A previous article posted a week or so ago from the same blog finally flipped the understanding switch in my head and I now understand how long addressable RGB

A previous article posted a week or so ago from the same blog finally flipped the understanding switch in my head and I now understand how long addressable RGB LED strips work. It's a similar shift-register principle in action. Each LED light along a wire reads a serial data line and extracts a certain number of bytes depending on the type of RGB LED it is, then passes the rest of the data on untouched before resetting to read mode again after a certain amount of time (the refresh rate). So, if you want to update the 5th LED color, you need to fill the pipe with the data for the first four LEDs which simply keep them the same color, and then the new data for the fifth LED at the end. I thought that was very cool.