These have been very helpful posts. I imagine I might have some questions about sourcing and part selection in the near future.
I just ordered a 1m strip from adafruit. I also ordered a bunch of single led modules/pixels from Bliptronics. I plan to experiment with everything I have and see what works/looks best for that various projects I have in mind. In the mean time I'd love to hear any progress you guys have made.
Have you any of you seen this: http://www.passion-ledlighting.com/
Basically a Chinese knock-off of the Color Kinetics/Philips iColor Flex line: http://www.colorkinetics.com/ls/rgb/
Color Kinetics is basically what's being using in big video displays at many concerts and sporting events.
I have no idea about pricing for either one, but might look into it.
With some luck a friend of mine may be able to get his hands on some of the Color Kinetics LED strings and the PSU/Drivers and Video software to run them. These use a 3 conductor wire. I am not sure what protocol they use or how they work exactly. Best I can tell all the nodes are in parallel. They seem to be limited either by power or data restrictions to less than 72 pixels per strand. They get around this by having psu/driver units that can handle many strands. And then the drivers can be daisy chained in a rack set-up via ethernet. For one of the big video screens you might see at a show, they could have entire racks of power/driving electronics. I'm not interested in doing any hi-res video, so this shouldn't be an issue for me. One cool thing about the strands is that they are very weather proof, and you can place the pixels at any point on the wire. They essentially have little teeth on them that pierce the wire strand. I think attention has to be paid to sealing any open puncture holes. This stuff can get very expensive. I'm mostly interested in seeing if I can drive these LEDS using an Arduino.