Multiple two pin multi-color LEDs pattern - how does this work?

Question

I'm quite blank when it comes to electronics, but am trying to learn...

So I bought a DIY Learning Kit from Banggood to get some solder practice.

As you can see from this video, the leds will change color and turn on and off in different patterns.

This question already establish that two pin RGB leds most likely contains some kind of micro chip, but it doesn't say anything about how they can be controlled.

The chip on the board is a STC15F204AE, and I guess that's the one responsible for creating the patterns. But again - how?

Is it just a fixed sequence pattern in the LED, and then the chip ensures that each LED receives power right after the previous, or is the LEDs addressable some how?

Answer 1

I'm afraid we're a smart about this as you are – for all we know (and as you know, from the answer you've linked to), the LED contains some controller itself. It might be controllable by shutting the supply voltage on and off, or by varying the input voltage.

The STC15F204AE is just a run-off-the-mill microcontroller – it was probably chosen for price reasons (it's not an established microcontroller brand, but uses the ancient, yet omnipresent 8051 CPU core architecture.) It executes some software (that we don't know) to send some commands (that we sadly don't know, either) to control the LEDs (which listen to some –unknown– form of commands).