These LEDs were easy and fun to work with! The only downside to working with such small LEDs, and other small components as well, is the pins ended up being very fragile. After soldering, be very careful with handling the LEDs. The solder joint was stronger than the pins themselves. On 4 of my LEDs, the Din pin snapped off because of an accidental tug on the wire that was soldered to it. I guess that's the trade-off for having small components, however.

Once you get these running, they're the cats ass for sure. I embed these in all sorts of projects. The only issue I have is during the reflow process. I use solder paste and a reflow oven and I have failures, 2 in 10 (firing a standard reflow curve). I then use my hot-air rework to drop in replacements. I e-mailed Adafruit about this a while ago, and they said their supplier said they needed to be tempered before reflowing? Never heard that term before. Can you offer any advice Sparkfun?a

They've been very reliable and worked consistently. I've purchased over 200 of them for projects and never had any troubles.

I was really impressed with the colors these modules created, just so vibrant they are mesmerizing.

The LEDs are good (as expected, so five stars), but the packaging leaves something to be desired. According to the datasheet these need to be baked for 48 hours at about 70C unless they were already baked and kept in a sealed package. They are extremely fragile internally, and tiny amounts of moisture will turn to steam when soldering, causing internal damage (one color might be out, or perhaps the entire LED will fail). If you bake the LEDs (as the datasheet requires), the LEDs will dry out and will be much less likely to be damaged during assembly. The datasheet recommends using the LEDs within 2 hours of baking, or within 2 hours of removing from a sealed package. Mouser and other distributors recognize this and ship components pre-baked and in a sealed package, and SFE should consider doing so as well.

I know from personal experience that baking (dehydrating) these LEDs before soldering is absolutely critical (at least during the more humid summer months). Even if not baked and sealed, SFE should at least include a note to the user warning of this critical step.

I ordered six packs of these SMD LEDs (60 LEDs total) for some modular synthesizer projects and all have worked fine. Cheaper options are available if you can wait an undefined length of time for oversees shipping so, as long as Sparkfun's inventory lasts, they're about the best thing going.

Needed them for underglow on a macro keyboard. Worked great and was much easier than trying to desolder some off a strip.