I'm looking to do a project where I have a "staff" of sorts with LED strips on the ends.
I would like to have some sort of way of detecting rotational speeds so I can spin it and sync it up to do all sorts of animations. I was looking for advice on how I would go about this? Currently I am thinking about using an accelerometer/gyroscope centered at the middle to detect this and do some sort of maths to sync up the frame rate and whatnot.
Would this work or is there a better solution?
Thanks 
A gyro would work -- the popular MPU6050 is cheap and readily available.
To get an accurate measure of the rotation rate, the gyro will need calibrating, in order to subtract the zero offsets.
Gyro's have error and drift though, its wise to add an accelerometer to correct for this, although the standard
sensor fusion code might not handle continuous rotation well, the correction signal from the accelerometer
probably needs to be derived from the phase information of the AC component of the accelerometer
signal.
Maybe you can glean something from @gfvalvo's project;
I couldn't remember this one earlier: Jiggy-Ninja's project.
Hi,
I think you are trying to describe this.
Try google arduino pov display
Tom..