Very cool!<p>We built a similar WS2812b array at university for an embedded systems design project: <a href="https://github.com/joe-wright/wiisel" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/joe-wright/wiisel</a><p>We looked at using a Raspberry Pi but instead settled on an mbed FRDM-KL25Z so we had more control over the signal timing. The trade-off was that the KL25Z only had 16KB memory instead of the Pi's 512MB, so getting everything to fit took a bit of creativity and a few late nights...
For that to work correctly, the piece of code generating the signal should never be interrupted.<p>To my knowledge, this is not possible with a Raspberry Pi. You should see glitches on the output when your loop generating the 1s and 0s is interrupted.<p>That may be ok it if you just when to send one static light pattern but the glitches should be more evident if you want to create beautiful, flowing light patterns.<p>That's why it's better to drive those WS2812b with an Arduino that you code bare metal.