So what LEDS are the cool kids using these days? Still WS2812B? Or is there a new toy that’s changed the game?
Been away from the community for a bit but am making my way back. Really cool stuff lately, great job everyone
Apa102 - up to 20mhz data rate, ~20khz pwm rate (vs 800khz data rate for the 2812s and a 400hz pwm rate)
In other words, they’re roughly 25 times as awesome.
Do you see a significant speed improvement on FastLED with an Arduino? Or does the processing now need to be upgraded to Teensy or RPi to take advantage of this speed?
Arduino is fine for most. Heck, I use a variant of FFT’s as well as FastLED on some of my Nano’s.
It really depends on what you’re driving/how much you’re driving. I do the bulk of my real (which is to say, non-FastLED development/testing) led work on the teensy 3.1 these days. I still have no reason to push myself up to an rPI or BBB 
Do you really need APA102 if you’re not doing persistence of vision or other fast movement of the LEDs?
Me, I love the APA102 for its imperviousness to interrupt/timing issues.
The WS2812s are too, if using DMA to move the data!
Not everyone is using platforms where that is an option :). (Also, the 650,000 rgb led updates/sec vs the ~250,000 rgb led updates per second are also a benefit for me w/apa102s
Also, I like to keep code as portable as (pragmatically) possible. It’s a challenge in the microcontroller world, but APA102s help support it.
I love being able to watch you brilliant people have these conversations.