Yeah, I'm guessing the same thing too, but it's pointless as the design is already well documented. If I were trying to rip off the strip itself I probably already have what I need. I don't see the point in withholding programming documentation from me (I tried asking them if they want to sell LED strips or they're trying to sell cheap shitty controllers - because it sure sounds like they're trying to protect the latter at the expense of the former but the language barrier doesn't help.) I've been buying from them for a while and told them I'd probably be able to (re)sell a lot of this stuff to hobbyists as the price is right, but only if we had the specs. No go..
The IC is manufactured by a company called DBIC (DBIC D7001, D7002) and I had found their website at one point. Rather unsurprisingly, they're a Chinese manufacturer too. This is probably a knockoff of someone else's chip design. I submitted requests to them (fudged it a little and said I was interested in using their product to design my own led strip) but got no replies back. The strips are sold under a part number "S301" across many "manufacturers", so I'm pretty sure they're all coming from one source. My main manufacturer claims this is their design - they are a large manufacturer of lighting, not a reseller - but it's hard to validate that as they've sold me products (controllers mainly) that look just like the same damn controllers everyone else sells. I have noticed most of the ws2801 strips (which I buy from them) from other sellers carry their part number on them, so they're at least a pretty big source of them. They may indeed be the main source of these too.
I think we'll only make progress with this once someone with the know-how can reverse engineer the protocol. I didn't buy a controller, but I could, and I do have a scope.. but I have no experience reverse engineering stuff at this low a level. If anyone has pointers, I'd be willing to request a controller in my next order with them.
I've posted what I have received from my manufacturers about these strips at:
http://www.insomnia.org/S301.pdf
Nothing exciting there, though, mostly just marketing blurb. I do think these are only 12 bit color strips though (4 for each of r, g, b) as the documentation claims 4k colors per LED (this could be a controller limitation, too. I've received controllers where it's obvious someone used a regular 'int' to track the number of 'pixels' and thus they're useless for LED strip lengths > 8M).
I'm unfortunately stuck working this beautiful day for my day job, so I'm going to take a crack at trying to talk to this thing as if it were one of those PCA9626 chips today.. maybe I'll get somewhere if they used this chip as the inspiration for this design..
BTW - shameless plug for myself - I do sell the same strips Adafruit does at a better price and with better availability (since that's what started the thread) :). The same site with the PDF can take you to my store, if anyone is interested.