yea I think I will need to check into doing this in code if you suggest this would be the best practice
I feel like dynamically switching power on and off is eventually going to run a spike down the strip and hurt one of the APA102s. And will probably make the apa102s glitchy if power is cycled too quick. Be best to shutdown in code. If its sending a datastream already then how much overhead is it to loads zeros instead of whats in the stream. Add a button/switch and use one IO pin.