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The Dimmer Plug is a small board containing the PCA9635 16-channel PWM LED driver. This driver communicates directly over I2C. There is a “DimmerPlug” class in the JeeLib library to interface with this driver, to set up to 16 individual light levels and blinking. Discrete transistors or MOSFETs, as well as Darlington arrays can be added to drive more LEDs or incandescent lamps in series or in parallel.

An I2C bus running at 3.3V is used as interconnect, with all the power and signal lines brought out to to both sides of the board to allow daisy-chaining with other I2C-conformant boards. Three solder jumpers for address selection allow up to 8 boards on a single I2C bus, for a total of 128 individually-controllable outputs.

The pre-assembled version comes with the SMD-sized PCA9635 chip and decoupling capacitor already soldered onto the board. This plug has 16 outputs, available via three 6-pin headers. Note that no 6-pin headers are included. 

The PCB only variant contains just the board for the Dimmer Plug. No parts, no headers.

As connectors you can use a Plug Headers set with 10 male and 10 female 6-pin headers, which makes it easy to connect multiple plugs and JeeNodes in a “standard” way. Or you can solder the board directly in place for more permanent use.

The documentation and full design details are freely available.