What's better than a single LED? Lots of LEDs! A fun way to make a small linear display is to use two 12-bar Bi-color bar-graphs.

However, this LED bargraph is 'multiplexed' - so to control all the 48 LEDs you need a lot of pins. Wouldn't it be awesome if you could control a colorful bargraph without tons of wiring? That's where this adorable LED bar-graph backpack comes in. 

The backpack uses a driver chip that does all the heavy lifting for you:

• It has a built in clock so it can multiplex the display.
• It uses constant-current drivers for ultra-bright, consistent color, 1/16 step display dimming, all via a simple I2C interface.
• The backpack comes with address-selection jumpers so you can connect up to eight of these bar-graphs on a single I2C bus. You can also mix-and-match the bar-graph breakout with our other types of I2C LED backpacks.

The product kit comes with:

• A fully tested and assembled LED backpack stick
• Two 12-bar bi-color bar-graphs
• 4-pin header

A bit of soldering is required to attach the matrix onto the backpack but its very easy to do and only takes about 5 minutes.

Adafruit have provided a detailed tutorial showing you how to solder, wire and control the display. They even wrote a library for the backpacks so you can get running in under half an hour, displaying images on the matrix or numbers on the 7-segment.

If you've been eyeing matrix displays but hesitated because of the complexity, this is the solution you've been looking for!