Adafruit: LED Strip LPD8806

The offical page can be found at Digital Addressable RGB LED w/ PWM waterproof flexi strip



Introduction
This is an LED strip housed in waterproof material with 32 LEDs per meter. The LEDs are controlled by shift registers using LPD8806 controller that controls two LEDs at a time with pulse width modulation. This chip has built in 1.2 MHz high speed 7-bit PWM for each channel which relates to 21-bit color. At each end is a 4-pin JST connector which is sealed in the 5 meter version. This needs to be powered by a 5V power source and should not go above 5.5V.

Code
https://github.com/adammhaile/RPi-LPD8806

https://github.com/Sh4d/LPD8806

http://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/spi/spidev_test.c

Troubleshooting
When I got the LED strip, it did not work as expected. Only the first two lights would stay lit and would only change based on random values that they would get when initialized with noise. After reading this thread on the Adafruit forums http://forums.adafruit.com/viewtopic.php?t=32825 we were able to get a working strip of LEDs.