I'm basically trying to build something that would allow me to do patterns to music across a 5x5 board of leds, i'm wondering if this is feasible with arduino. I've got some sound controllers and some strips of LEDS. I know i can get the leds wired and get them to flash/change colors, i'm just wondering if there's any issues with running a bunch of led strips off of the arduino, will i be able to power that many leds and control them?
You'll need drivers to "power" the LEDs.
I know i can get the leds wired and get them to flash/change colors
If you're using RGB LEDs you can't wire them as a matrix, so you'll want to wire/address them serially even if they are physically arranged in a 5 x 5 matrix.
i'm just wondering if there's any issues with running a bunch of led strips off of the arduino, will i be able to power that many leds and control them?
Is it a 5 x 5 matrix (25 LEDs) or a bunch of LED strips?
The [u]Shift Out Example[/u] shows how you can use a shift register to control an almost unlimited number of LEDs serially with 3 Arduino output pins and daisy-chained shift registers.
I've got a sound activated lighting effect that has 48 addressable LEDs (single color) driven by six [u]MAX6968[/u] chips. These devices can also be daisy-chained.
Although you can address all of the LEDs (and RGB colors) and turn then on & off individually, the "basic" shift register cannot dim LEDs, so if you want all possible RGB colors, you'll need a more advanced driver.
I would suggest looking at Adafruit's neoPixels; these are tricolor LED's already daisy-chained, and with a library to rapidly pump color data to them. They take a single data line from the Arduino. There actually quite cheap for the convenience they offer. Of course, you can't fight physics: you will need about 60 ma. per LED, and that can't be delivered through an Arduino power supply.