I don’t suppose anyone has got a simple list of the pros and cons for addressable leds?
im starting a small simple project, 24 leds, full colour, pretty colour changes, but now there are so many different types!
im planning for the ws2801, 25 pc at a rather nice £15.99 from ebay delivered, which i know the fast spi will work with quite nicely, but it’d be useful to know for future projects!
Current, supported hotness:
ws2811’s - (adafruit sells these as “neopixels”) super cheap (30 leds/m for $6, 60 leds/m for $11!), very slow data rate (800Kbps - meaning you’d want to investigate parallel output for more than a few hundred leds - see paul’s excellent OctoWS2811 if you’re using a teensy 3 - and i’m currently working on code for FastSPI_LED2 that will allow grouping/blocking of multiple streams of output in parallel - hopefully that will be out some time in july - I have an installation going in on july 4th that will be using it :). Also - many of the strips are 1 led, 1 controller, so you can cut at every led. Even better, is the ws2812 variant, which is the led and chip in a single package (some people still sell these as ws2811 - but the protocol is the same) - so it can be very very compact.
lpd8806’s - less cheap (closer to $16/meter shipped for 48/m), but super fast (i’ve pushed them at upwards of 22Mbps!). Also, they’re paired, so it’s one controller per 2 rgb pixels.
Older, still supported, lukewarm:
ws2801 - older, cheap(ish) - but slow (1Mbps), i’ve found it prone to glitching at longer lengths, and higher data rates are right out.
tm1809 - similar in protocol to the ws8211, similar cost benefit when it was out, 1 IC per 3 rgb leds, seems to be a lot twiticher re: line interference
Weird shit:
UCS1903 - similar to tm1809/ws2811. Not sure why this exists, honestly. Very very slow protocol, closer to 400kbps.
SM16716 - implemented because a couple people asked for it. Terrible protocol.
DMX controllers - if your’e controlling your leds using DMX from an arduino, this will drive DMX using the rest of the led library
Upcoming (as in, july/august/sep, depending, timeframe), unclear on hotness, or if they will be made to work.
P9813 - This is the chipset used in Cool Neon’s Total Control Lighting (or Total Lighting Control? I don’t remember which it is). I have reference code for this but haven’t tested it yet.
TM1829 - similar to the TM1809/WS2811, but also allows setting 32 base current levels for brightness/power usage control - i have a set of these, but the code for them doesn’t work yet
TLS3001 - i get a lot of requests for this one. Unsure what benefits it provides, but among other things it’s 12-bits per color vs. 8-bit for most of the currently supported chipsets.
APA102 - I don’t remember much about this one, other than I have a sample that I was asked to implement support for
TI TLC5940 - this is a heavy hitter - also 12 bit color, led color correction support, 16 led channels per chip - i’ve heard of people doing RGBW with setups like this.
Seems like useful information to have - copied over to wiki here - https://code.google.com/p/fastspi/wiki/ChipsetOverview
wow thanks! in depth!
None of the existing strips are setup as true constant current mode devices (not PWM’d constant current driver) right?
I believe that’s the case, yes. For a brief while I had hoped that the tm1829 would be that chipset, however upon deeper reading of the data sheet and some conversations, it looks instead like it is just a brightness adjustment of the constant current used by the leds (useful in different ways - amusingly enough, this comes after mark and I put inline brightness control into the library 
re: lpd8806’s @Daniel_Garcia said “Also, they’re paired, so it’s one controller per 2 rgb pixels.”
Sorry if this is a noob question, but what does being paired mean ?
It means one chip controls 2 rgb pixels (or, more accurately, it has 6 PWM outputs, which are usually tied to r, g and b of 2 rgb led pixels) vs. something like the ws2811 which controls 1 rgb pixel (it has 3 PWM outputs, again usually tied to r, g, and b of 2 rgb led pixels).
All i meant by paired is that it controls a pair of leds.