A look at some addressable LED strings and a controller

The addressable LED strings are very popular these days. They basically allow a long string of RGB LEDs to be controlled individually. This is normally achieved by sending the data out as a continuous stream with each LED taking it's chunk of information and then forwarding the data through onto the next LED in line.
There are two basic types. Three wire and four wire. The three wire uses a single data line with strict timing requirements while the four wire version uses a clock and data line that makes driving them much easier.