This repository is for the software stuff of our backspace sign.
To light our sign we bought 3m of the addressable RGB stripes from insomnia lightning. Those stripes have a LPD8086 controller IC for every 2 RGB LEDs.
The server is written in C and running on a Raspberry Pi. It takes a complete frame from UDP on port 10001 and sends it to SPI. Each RGB LED has 3 bytes. Each byte must have a value between 0 to 127 for the brightness. The MSB is ignored.
Sample command line to set all LEDs to white: perl -e 'print "\xFF\xFF\xFF"x156' | nc -u 10001
The byte order for the colors is RED, GREEN, BLUE.
More information might be available at http://www.hackerspace-bamberg.de/Schild (german).