I did something similar with a Raspberry Pi and a string of WS2801 12mm diffused LEDs from Adafruit: http://www.andrewmunsell.com/blog/raspberry-pi-leds/ http:

I did something similar with a Raspberry Pi and a string of WS2801 12mm diffused LEDs from Adafruit: http://www.andrewmunsell.com/blog/raspberry-pi-leds/ http://www.andrewmunsell.com/blog/raspberry-pi-leds/ Because the LED string I used has an SPI-like protocol to control them, it can be done directly from the Raspberry Pi's GPIO pins without the need of an Arduino middle-man. Right now, it's implemented in Node.js as well (using the node-spi library), but I'm also working on a Golang version that's completely standalone and just uses the SPI device in /dev.