I have finally managed to flash my colorduino, but now I am stuck with a new problem. The color plasma demo doesn't work. Nothing displays at all. I added some serial output, so I know the program is running. But I imagine that maybe some settings are wrong for my board or I'm doing something really wrong. Most of the guides I found are running the colorduino as a slave for another arduino, but I want to write a program for the colorduino directly. This must be possible, right? I've tried the Colorduini lib v 1.2.4 and I'm setting the board to Arduino Nano w/ ATmega 328.
I'm not going to be a lot of help here but .. me too!
I've brought a Colorduino from good ole eBay as I've been playing with shift registers and LED cubes up to now and thought the RGB Matrix looked to be a good thing to move up to next, but there is very little help with it. http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/160956072486
I have managed to change the default demo programming on it from the one second red, blue, green flashing to the demo plasma sketch and I even managed to figure out the white balance by changing the plasma code slightly, but thats it. All other demo sketches I've found over the past few days all fail to compile.
It is possible to write directly to the unit as I've not got it wired as a slave (that was partly the appeal of this board), I just used a TTL to USB cable: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/261101529602
For starters, the rainbowduino that you linked to is NOT the same as the colorduino, and does not use the same libraries as the colorduino.
If you actually have the rainbowduino, there is lots of great info here Rainbowduino v3.0 | Seeed Studio Wiki
As for help getting it to work, a great place to start would be to post the code that you are using with your rainbowduino. Click the # symbol in the menu, and paste your code between the code tags.