Hey crew, I was looking for some advice. I am going to buy about 4500 LEDs for a big project. I was thinking of going with WS2812B because they are somewhat affordable. I only need 30 pixel/meter density, so I was going to go with Ray Wu’s deal below. However, since this will be such a large investment, I am hoping to future-proof it at least a little bit. Mostly I am thinking about the faster communication you can get with chips like LPD8806. Do you think it’s worth the extra investment (1.5X to 2X the price) to go with these much faster chips? Will I kick myself later on when I salvage these 4500 LEDs and they are too slow for a future project?
@800Khz(WS2812B) you should be able to drive a serial chain of @ 1K leds and maintain a refresh rate with imperceptible flicker … run 4 in parallel … NOW … I’m speaking theoretically having zero experience and absolute faith in Daniels code … I defer at this point to the experts
@Daniel_Wilson1 go with the APA102 or SK9288 pixels, they have 20mhz and 30Mhz data rates, and are 100% future proof for your provided example
1000 LEDs is 30ms per frame - which caps you at 30fps - which is a shitty, flicker full rate
Really Daniel ? Vid @ 30fps / film @ 24 … this medium doesn’t suit the same vision persistence ? hmm learn something new every day … like I said … I defer to the experts
I find led pieces to be jittery at anything below 60fps, drives me up a wall - my preference is to hit 90+ if I can (get above 100-200hz and you can take advantage of dithering). Also - to get 1000 leds at 30fps you’d have to spend 100% of your CPU time pushing out led data - which means realistically, you’re looking at 15fps.
Doing it out 8 in parallel means 3.75ms to write a frame - which would be closer to 120fps w/50% of the cpu time spent building frames. (Or, you could animate at 30fps, and basically have 4 frames of dithered output per animated frame).
Cool … thanks for the brief … so much to learn …
If it makes you feel any better, I’ve been doing FastLED for nearly 6 years and still have much to learn 
Likewise with Teensy, 8 years and only just now am I getting around to really improving libraries like SD & Ethernet… and starting to look at ways to really leverage the far more capable hardware (and it’s steep learning curve) that’s only just recently come onto the microcontroller market. Still so much to learn and do…
Film is 24 but they display the same frame at least 3 times. So at 72hz. Most LCD LED tv’s refresh with 100hz y 200 hz refresh rate as well. Otherwise its to flickery.
Sidenote: How do you push so many pixels over from a PC to the display and with what microcontroller? MEGA + USB + high serial baud rate? 4096 LEDs * 3 colors * 8 bit * 30 fps is already ~3MBit…
Maybe this will help. 4320 LEDs, 30 Hz update. Since this project was built 2 years ago, FastLED has gained the ability to use OctoWS2811 as a driver. FastLED has more efficient rendering (to RAM) and OctoWS2811 can efficiently stream the memory to 8 parallel outputs, so you get the best of both. 
Thank you everyone for all the awesome advice. It has been really helpful. Now that FastLED incorporates temporal dithering, it would be nice to have a refresh rate that’s fast enough to take advantage of that functionality. I will post another topic about temporal dithering so that discussion isn’t buried in comments.