The PCA9551 LED blinker blinks LEDs in I2C-bus and SMBus applications where it is necessary to limit bus traffic or free up the I2C-bus master's (MCU, MPU, DSP, chip set, etc.) timer. The uniqueness of this device is the internal oscillator with two programmable blink rates. To blink LEDs using normal I/O expanders like the PCF8574 or PCA9554, the bus master must send repeated commands to turn the LED on and off. This greatly increases the amount of traffic on the I2C-bus and uses up one of the master's timers.