“Time for another project with a super-low-cost microcontroller. But what to design? Ever since seeing a project where a $0.03 MCU controls $40 worth of intelligent RGB LEDs, I have been wondering whether this is the right place to use these devices. At this price point, doesn’t it seem to make more sense to dedicate one MCU to one LED each and use it to implement a fancy node-controller? It has always appealed to me to design my own protocol. However, just copying a WS2812 RGB LED or similar seemed to be a bit pointless…
After seing this (and also this and this) chainable and adressable 7-Segment display it was clear what to do: Why would you use three WS2811 ICs to control a single 7-segment display when a single microcontroller could do it better at a lower cost?”