I have seen some cool videos of users witch have used ws2812 ledstrips to create lamps witch looks like they are on fire. I have also seen that there are a hardware called fadecandy that have been used on some more advanced projects where several strips acts like a display.
If I just want to create some "fire-lamps" can I achieve that using only a mini pro/nano and a 2812 ledstrip and the correct libraries? Or do I need some other hardware to generate the effects with good quality? I saw some post where someone hade flashed the fadecandy firmware to a teensy, but the teensy is about the same price as the fadecandy so I don't really se the advantage of that.
If I need a fadecandy or similar could I flash that firmware to a nano instead or is the fadecandy not needed?
I would think something like that second video should be possible with Nano or similar. The limitations of 8-bit 16MHz and 2K ram limit how many leds you can drive and how quickly you can update them. I'm not sure what hardware fadecandy uses, but Teensy 3 series is 32-bit 48MHz+ and far more ram.
Ok If I would try to keep it as cheap as possible would Wemos D1 be a better choice? I know they are ESP8266 but as I understand it is possible to use arduino code on them as well. Or are there any other relativly cheap arduino that is better for the task?
The D1 mini is my current favorite Dev board. It can drive ws2812 leds and is at least 5 or 10 times faster with lots of ram. I'm currently using one to drive a wall clock consisting of a circle of 60 ws2812 leds.
The D1 mini is certainly capable of driving a lot of these leds. But I don't know of it would be capable of the third demo you posted the link to. The reason I say that is because it may be necessary to send data out to multiple strings simultaneously, to overcome the speed limitation of the ws2812 leds themselves. I'm pretty sure the esp chip has the speed to be able to do it but I don't know if a library with that capability is available for the esp.