LED decisions

Our original idea was to use RGB led strips for lighting of the project. This seemed like a step above normal LEDs because more colors could be used without an insane amount of wiring, while it was also easy to have many LEDs in the area without much added complexity. The main drawback, however, was that each LED could not be controlled individually. Rather, each strip could be controlled along the RGB spectrum, so we could have used several different strips to get different colors going at once. However, we found a more useful solution that would be much better suited to our project. Using individually addressable LEDs from sparkfun, we could not only control a full range of colors for each LED, but have the ability to move around each LED instead of confining it to a strip. The model we used is here:  https://www.sparkfun.com/products/12877

Each LED has four pins - Din, Vdd, Gnd, and Dout. Din can connect to an mbed digital out pin, which controls the LED using a series of pulses. To control more than one at a time, the Dout on one light is simply connected to Din on the next one. Each LED is controlled by 24 bits, 8 for each color. This also allows for a very wide range of color choices, which will also be a good benefit for our design.