The

Dawm

is a small kit that allows extending the capabilities of your microcontroller boards when it comes to dim many pins easily. The kit includes a breakout board for the TLC5940 integrated circuit. This chip uses pwm (pulse width modulation) on 16 different pins and it is controlled over serial communication. The IC's max rating is 17V and 120mA/pin. This is adjustable by an resistor down to about 10 mA/pin.

It is possible to daisy chain the board. According to the IC's datasheet it should be possible to have up to 640 individually addressable devices!! (e.g. 640 LEDs at 16 LEDs per Dawm implies 40 Dawms)

This board was designed by David Sjunnesson from 1scale1.com in 2008. The first series were manufactured in Korea and got that pretty BlushingBoy yellow.

David put together an Instructable documenting how to mount and use the board here. He references previous work made on the Arduino playground, where it is possible to find a long post about the TLC5940. If you are looking for this chip's datasheet, you can get it here from Texas Instruments.