Hi,
I held an Arduino workshop yesterday in North Delta for some Venturers (as in Scouts) and was fortunate enough to have Simon Lyons (from the Makermobile) attend and assist with the workshop.
Each attendee was provided an Arduino Nano, a strip of 20 APA102 LED’s (same as Adafruit DotStars), a AAA battery pack, batteries and a diffuser (some white split loom tubing). We used the FastLED library and I provided several ‘ready to roll’ examples for them. Here’s the slides I’d prepared for this event:
This was an all day event and everyone tried and modified various examples and ended up with a cool item that they can hack on their own. The great thing about the (very cool) APA102’s is that they have a much higher refresh rate than the WS281XX/Neopixel series of LED’s and can be used in POV applications.
Anyways, just thought I’d post.