ADAFRUIT INDUSTRIES 757 LOGIC LEVEL CONVERTER, 4CH, ARM DEVELOPMENT BOARD (1 piece)

hi this is John Park for Adafruit Industries and I wanted to talk to you today about using a level shifter so that you can get a microcontroller that runs on 3.3 volts to talk to neopixels which run on five volts so what's all this about logic level shifters anyway well what happens is we have a power and ground coming from a power supply in this case I've got a five volt and 10 amp power supply pretty beefy one that can run the lights on this neopixel strip but there's a third pin on the neopixel and that's the data line that's the control coming from our microcontroller telling each pixel what to do what color what brightness when to light up and the problem is when these 3.3 volt microcontrollers are trying to talk to the data pin on the neopixel you can end up with some pretty strange results I've had everything from dim pixels to dead pixels to the wrong color showing up and it's k