Interesting build #inspiration
Cool!
(Would be even cooler if they used a four-wire driver chip, e.g. APA102-ish…)
Heh. I was just tacking some FETs onto a spare ws2812 strip for such purposes.
You might save a little time with one of these, too.
http://www.dxsoul.com/product/full-color-rgb-led-strip-driver-module-for-arduino-blue-black-901314667
To FastLED, it’ll look like one pixel, and yes, you can daisy chain them.
The DX thing is perfect for me. Except it’s not in my basement already.
I know exactly what you mean!
(And just so you know, for a few bucks more, they could be in your basement tomorrow http://www.amazon.com/Next-Strip-Driver-Module-Arduino/dp/B00ORMR22G/ but sometimes tomorrow is a long way away.)
Eh. The relevant truck has metaphorically left. And I put a couple of the DX ones on order for the stock pile. 
I’ve made an ESP8266/Arduino/APA102 PCB but the shipping is taking ages to get here for me to actually assemble and test. It’s been more than six weeks in the post now. When it does, and if it proves to be reliable/functional, I will post the link to the PCB. I would love to be able to use some FastLED functions on the ESP - it’s such a great little processor.
You can totally use big parts of FastLED on the ESP-- the color, math, noise. But no actual LED drivers at this point.
We have some chips/boards, and they’re nifty, but that port will take a little extra work; it’s not AVR or ARM, and it has a different low-level architecture, which is where we live. It’ll get there, but honestly not any time soon.
In the meantime, “all the rest” of FastLED can be used, if you’re willing to do some meatball surgery to extract the non-LED-driving parts.
We actually have a bit of a plan to port to “no board”: to make the math and color and noise etc more easily available on platforms where we don’t support the board.
Thanks Mark.
@Mark_Kriegsman So does that circuit allow you to power a 10W RGB led on it and then string them together like WS2801 pixels?
I think the original post is that. The DX thing I posted is designed to run ‘analog’ (non-addressable) RGB LED strips. The whole strip acts like one big pixel.
AFAICT the DX thing and this thing are about the same. This has a good formfactor for the 10w rgb LEDs, and the DX one has screw terminals