I bought a teensy on impulse to mess around with LED strips, and this library he wrote is awesome: https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/td_libs_OctoWS2811.html#tech htt

I bought a teensy on impulse to mess around with LED strips, and this library he wrote is awesome: https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/td_libs_OctoWS2811.html#tech https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/td_libs_OctoWS2811.html#tech It takes care of all the low-level details and offloads almost all of the work onto the DMA controller, leaving the CPU free to service interrupts or run other code. It reduces controlling individual LEDs to something as simple as a putPixel.