LED Panel v3

It's that time of the year again to revisit the rack of LEDs. I did a little research on doing a straight shift register approach to control the standard blue LEDs. That would probably work fine, the main drawback is having to wire every light back to the control board. I think instead I will use APA102C individually addressable LEDs. This will give me RGB control and I don't have to home run wire the LEDs. They do like to be wired in ordered, but because of the hardware it will need to be 32 units:

1 2 3 7 8 9

4 5 6 10 11 12

13 14 15 19 20 21

16 17 18 22 23 24

UPDATE: It looks like NeoMatrix Library will take care of this....

Next we need some cool patterns. For the side light something like these tweaking lights.