So after ordering a load of WS2812B strips from Alibaba I realise now that they’re actually quite slow and won’t do quite what I want to do with them.
So I am looking at the alternatives and it looks like LPD8806 are the quickest.
Anything I should know before making another order?
What kind of time frame are you looking at? I’m hoping to do some testing with the APA102 chipset this week - it sounds like I can get a higher data rate than what the data sheet claims (this is something I want to confirm - but if true, it’d be close to 8Mbps vs. WS2812’s 800Kbps), and has a 2.5khz refresh rate vs. WS2812’s 400hz refresh rate.
However, at the moment I’m wary of sending folks down that line until I see these things with my own eyes first hand 
The nice thing about the APA102 vs. the LPD8806 is it is packaged like the WS2812 (the 6 pin version, not the WS2812B, which is a 4 pin version) - so no external chips!
“As fast as freaking possible” — I want to use it to concept an installation that shows speed of racing cars so about 60 to 70 metres per second. 60 to 70 mm per ms. At least 120fps — 240 even better. Fast basically!
in that case - LPD8806 - I’ve pushed that at around 20Mbps - which is still 2.5 times faster than the fastest the APA102’s are rumored to run at
What are you using to output at that rate? I presume that I should be able to attain huge fps assuming the hardware can maintain the output.
That was off of a teensy 3.0 using the hardware SPI pins.
Ok, cool — Teensy 3.1 is my weapon of choice so I’m good to go.