Jambu Serial LED Control Orca
The Jambu Serial LED Control Orca is a compact and powerful 8-channel LED driver breakout module designed to bring dynamic lighting to your projects. Whether you’re driving LED strips, individual LEDs, or incandescent bulbs, Jambu gives you full serial control over every channel through a simple two-wire I²C interface.
Powered via a 5V barrel jack and compatible with common anode Serial RGB LED strips, Jambu integrates seamlessly with FREE-WILi and any QWIIC-equipped system — making it a versatile building block for lighting installations, interactive displays, and hardware prototypes.
Each of the eight channels breaks out to its own 3-pin connector (VCC / signal / GND), so every strip gets clean power and its own drive signal. An onboard LED Power Select jumper lets you feed the strips from either the external 5V barrel jack or FREE-WILi’s own 5V USB rail — run small setups straight off the handheld, or switch to the barrel jack when your strips need more current. The QWIIC port is buffered through an NXP PCA9517A level-translating I²C bus repeater, cleanly bridging FREE-WILi’s 3.3V I²C bus to QWIIC add-on boards. Jambu mounts to FREE-WILi through the standard 20-pin Orca expansion header, which carries the SPI, UART, I²C, and GPIO signals that drive the channels.
Features
- Channels
- 8-channel LED Driver Breakout
- LED Strips
- Control 8 LED Strips
- Outputs
- 8× 3-pin connectors — VCC / signal / GND per channel
- Power
- 5V Barrel Jack Power (PJ-102AH jack)
- Power Select
- Jumper selects LED power source: 5V barrel jack or FREE-WILi 5V USB rail
- Compatibility
- Common anode Serial RGB LED strips, LEDs, and Incandescent bulbs
- Control
- Two-Wire I²C-Compatible Control Interface
- Prototyping
- I²C (QWIIC) connector, buffered by an NXP PCA9517A I²C bus repeater
- Host Interface
- 20-pin FREE-WILi Orca expansion header (SPI, UART, I²C, GPIO)
Schematic
Full schematic for the Jambu Orca (V1, Rev. 8/16/2024). Click the image to zoom, or download the schematic PDF.
