LEDs come in many different colors, packages, brightnesses and technologies. With so many options, you’ll have many things to consider as you plan your project and choose the best LED for your needs.
How big do you want your LEDs to be? Are you using them in a breadboard, soldering them by hand, or designing a PCB? Individual through-hole LEDs are great for prototyping and can be incorporated into just about any project. Small, surface-mount SMD LEDs work great if you want to design and populate your own PCB.
Do you want a single, solid color, or is the variable RGB more your speed? You can have colored, diffused, or clear plastic housings. There are even unique options like infared and ultraviolet LEDs for special projects.
How many LEDs do you want? Do you want a single LED as a power indicator light, or are you looking to create a wall-sized display? Single LEDs can be incorporated into just about any project, but strips or panels will be easier to set up for large displays. More LEDs will also require more power to light them all at once.
The brighter the LED, the more current it requires. If your power supply (or the space for it) is limited, your LED's brightness will also be limited. High-current LEDs will require specially designed driver boards or MOSFETs for control, in addition to any microcontroller you may use. Another option to take control of the brightness is to use Pulse Width Modulation (PWM), which requires a microcontroller.
While individual LEDs can be turned on and off with just a switch, addressable LED types such as WS2812 and APA102 let you control many individual LEDs, but will require more complex code than turning on and off a simple LED. The APA102 LEDs are very similar to WS2812s with a few caveats: APA102s can be controlled with a standard SPI interface, and they have an extremely high PWM frequency. We recommend using FastLED (an Arduino library) for controlling your LEDs.
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