Higher powered digital pot

Other Hardware General Electronics
1

Short version: Is there a digital pot that can drive around 10mA instead of the 2.5mA which seems to be standard? Ideally this would be a quad pot because I need 3 separate controls.

Long version:

I'm using 3 TLC5916 constant current drivers to drive the cathodes of a matrix of 24x16 LEDs; these chips use one resistor each to regulate current to the LEDs (e.g. 910 ohm gives each LED 20mA, 160 ohm gives each 120mA, etc.). The TI chip sheet is here:

I want to adjust overall brightness of the matrix via a photoresistor reading room light level. I thought I could do this with a MCP4451 i2c quad pot (http://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/DeviceDoc/22267A_MCP4431.pdf) but after Crossroad's advice on transistors I've been rereading the spec sheets and see that that chip only supports 2.5mA per pot. My multimeter says the TLC5916's pull about 7mA through their resistors, so that's not going to work.

I've been looking around and it seems that 2.5mA on a digital pot is standard. Does anybody know of one that can drive a (slightly) higher current?

Thanks

2

Data sheet for AD5204/AD5206 says 11 mA for 10 kohm version.
Why not to do adjustment of the brightness in "software", feeding light sensor signal to analog port, than use it as a coefficient to set a led outputs?

3

Thanks for the part info; I'll check it out.

I was originally going to use the light sensor data to adjust the PWM of the LEDs directly like you suggest, but so far I can only get 8 levels of brightness on each LED before I see flicker, and I wanted more overall granularity than that.

Thanks again.