Does anyone have experience they can share about the 16*16 WS2812b pixel matrix sold online? Similar to the one I linked to below:
http://www.aliexpress.com/item/2x-16-16-Pixel-WS2812B-Digital-Flexible-LED-Panel-WS2811-Individually-Color-DC5V/1356794009.html
I’ve played with them a little bit - they like to draw a lot of power, and they aren’t entirely as flexible as one might want/think (e.g. I wouldn’t expect to make comfortable clothing with them 
Also - they’ll eat your ram, 768 bytes of ram per panel - so you’ll want to keep that in mind when picking your controller.
I was thinking about making these into a holiday display screen using a Teensy 3.0. I have two salvaged 1200w 5v switching power supplies and I think one would be more than enough.
I am going to think about the logistics of building such a monster.
I’ve used these panels with a Teensy3 and been pretty happy with it.
How many of the boards are you considering? Also, are you intending to generate the visuals on the teensy or pipe video/animations from somewhere else? If the latter, you might want to take a look at OctoWS2811 or Fadecandy - which drives 8 WS2811 family lines in parallel, and basically uses the teensy 3 as a dumb frame buffer.
One thing to keep in mind (and the reason why I recommend parallel lines/libraries (and yes, FastSPI_LED2 will do that eventually, I have some prototyping working now, but unlike fadecandy/octows2811, it’s important for me to make this parallelization work with the full range of led chipsets FastSPI_LED2 works with :), is the WS2812B is a relatively slow data protocol - at 800kbps, that means that you spend roughly 30µs per led being written, or 7ms per 256 pixel board. OctoWS2811 and Fadecandy, by writing 8 lines out in parallel effectively gives you 8x the frame rate.
To start, I am going to use a single panel and make it fly - under my quad copter . The remaining 9 panels I was thinking about a 3 by 3 panel matrix (48 by 48 led). I’ll take another look at Fadecandy and OctoWS2811.
Fadecandy itself builds on OctoWS2811 - I know the person who is working on it, there’s some great stuff in there. Because it caps the length of each line it does very very very high framerate pushing - which means it can play games with micro-adjustments to a pixel’s brightness to get you greater than 256 levels of brightness control (Hey Mark, remember when we joked about PWM’ing the PWM? That’s what Micah is doing – also, the DMA buffering in Fadecandy is a bit better than OctoWS2811.
Yeah, I have some PMWing the PWM code up and running to get more-or-less 16 bits of dimming. Works OK, too, as long as the frame rate is good enough. #after2.0 #wayafter