Hello Everybody! so I need the collective knowledge that is stored in this group of people. I am working on a project that involves about 11 meters of LED strip light, I have been playing around with a little adafruit 60 led ring just to get to program some “decent” stuff, but when the time comes to go to the big leagues, I want to know what would you guys recommend given the amount of LEDs (60 pixels / meter) and the fact that I love/need the brightness, so… NeoPixel vs Dotstar? running with an Arduino Mega 2560 and FastLED library (of course). Obviously I have no experience with neither of this products, so any type of guidance is very appreciated.
APA102 and a Teensy seems to be the latest favourite shopping list.
I suppose it depends on speed and complexity of your construction.
Well, the other part that I forgot to mention is that this protect is to add effects to a scenery piece in a theater… So I am using a Conceptinetics DMX shield, and using extra pins to control some solenoids and relays… Hence the reason for arduino, plus I am kind of new to this and arduinobis kind of the only development board I am used to :s
Yes I would agree apa102 is the best right now if your budget will stretch. The global brightness setting turned out really handy for our big led project at work since it allowed us to dim the LEDs without losing color depth, very nice indeed.
Cristobal, so you are using DMX…and you are controlling 11m * 60leds/m = 660leds. So, you probably know that if you control the LED pixels directly from DMX that you can only get 512/3 = 170 pixels worth of control from the one DMX universe. So are you pre-programming your own sequences or scenes using FastLED and then triggering/controlling the scenes using a sub-set of DMX channels as inputs? Also, are you confident that your Arduino controller of choice will be able to do both FastLED pixel outputs and DMX inputs simultaneously without internal timer or interrupt conflicts? Let me know if I am missing anything. Thx!
-frenchy (Steve French)
http://www.voltvision.com
Hey there frenchy, you got that right, I am preprogramming some sequences with some modifyers (speed, color, etc.) and using dmx to trigger the sequences and adjust the modifyers. I wish I could be confident the arduino will handle it but you got a lot more experience than me… My options if it doesn’t seem possible is splitting it into 3 sections (not so good since the sequence will look broken) or, if I am not talking nonsense here, to use another little controller like the mbed ARM cortex ones… Of course I would first have to learn to program some stuff on that one and this is parting from my idea that if it is also programmed using C/C++ the libraries could work on it.
o.k. Steve, my lack of experience shows, but now I did a bit more research and I think the Teensy 3.1 is the way to go on the controller end, now I just have to decide on the LED strip …
well, Mike you convinced me and a Teensy 3.1 and a bunch of meters of APA 102 are on their way… but I just got mildly concerned about one thing, being used to Hobby level projects using arduino etc, now I am reading this posts about using level shifters or other breakout boards to drive this… any hints on whether I need or not level shifters or even how to wire this up, as I said and keep showing, I am very enthusiastic and with big projects in my head that my experience level simply doesnt match, but I am trying haha. any advice, drawing, diagram video tutorial or anything really will be greatly apreciated 
You are supplying the LED strip with a signal, which will be passed from apa102 to apa102, all down the line. After the first 3.3v signal, it will be repeated at 5v. I haven’t used a 3.3v device, so would defer to others as to whether a level shifter is needed.
And wiring them up is easy. +5v and Gnd, with a signal and clock pin from your MCU.
Grab one of the example Fastled sketches, they will have the pins set up as an example.
Add power every metre or two, to keep the levels up at the LEDs.
well if the signal gets repeated and “shifted up” to 5v then it should be fine, I am just a bit worried because it is an 11 m strip, not the biggest in the world, but a whole bunch of LED that may bring the signal level down after a couple of meters. and I know the Strip will need a clock pin and a data pin, but do I have to use any of the SPI specific pins or can they be any digital pin pair? I am sorry I have so many silly or newbie questions, it is just I am used to mess around with arduino and Neopixel and this big project is for the theater I work at, so I will have a bit of pressure once the parts get here… so I am trying to cover all my bases 
Exactly the same as neopixel, but with an extra clock pin. At 11M you are going to need to re power it every metre or two. The signal shouldn’t degrade, as it is read in by one control chip, then sent out to the next, all digital-like.
What exactly are you intending to make?
This might help: Fasled, DMX, Teensy and Ws2811 (add another pin for clocking the APA) https://www.snip2code.com/Snippet/383151/DMX-control-of-neopixels--WS2811--WS2812
Forget about SPI, you won’t be using it, unless you want to.
I suspect this is the point where someone more programmy and smarter needs to chime in…
Perfect on the Cabling situation, now instead of explaining what I am doing, here is the code, as explained as I could, check it out and any comments, suggestions, help or pointers will be very welcomed…
http://pastebin.com/FCLXZhRk
You will need to define a pin for the clock as well as defining the APA102 and its data rate:
#define CLOCK_PIN 5
#define DATA_PIN 40
#define DATA_RATE 12 // or #define DATA_RATE 24
FastLED.addLeds<APA102, DATA_PIN, CLOCK_PIN, RGB, DATA_RATE_MHZ(DATA_RATE)>(leds, NUM_LEDS);
And I’m not sure about pin 40 on the Teensy 3.1 (BTW, your original Arduino would have worked fine with this. For 60 LEDs, you would have had no problems at all).
hahaha Sorry for that, My current test/mess around setup is an Arduino Mega 2560, and a Neopixel 60 LED ring, but it will be ported to the Teensy 3.1 and 660 ish APA 102 LEDs Thank you very much for the coments though, I still have to work a lot on the animations as you saw commented there, But as I understand a little bit more and more about how it all works, I hope I get to make all the animations work.
Good luck, it looks like a great project.