Jeremy, first off, excellent work on this project, I ordered one on kickstarter, I can’t wait to receive it, I had considered doing a pixel art display on my own a few years back, but never got the time. The way the game frame is designed, particularly with the vellum diffusion and separated pixels is absolutely brilliant (pun intended).
My question is, what data pin are are you using to drive the WS2812’s? and what sequence (i’ll elaborate on that shortly). I thought about making a 32×32 version for personal use because I would love to do Basic SNES sprites, I would probably lasercut the grid out of black acrylic and would use overall smaller pixels and spacing. I estimate it would come in at about 500mm square. I would use the Mega2560 to drive it as it has 8K of ram. I think the whole thing could be scaled up even further by adding additional SRAM, the 2560 has support for this at the cost of I/O (but it has more than enough I/O for this type project). The SRAM can be expanded up to 128K which in theory could do 128×128. The issue then becomes one of power delivery and clock speed. 32×32 is probably the largest practical without going to something like an ARM or even FPGA. Plus in my case, since I would just be doing a 1-off, I would be hand soldering 1024 LEDS at 32×32. anything more just scales to ludicrous numbers.
Anyhow, i digress, my question on sequence is this, assuming a shortened 4×4 grid for example sake how do you have your WS2812’s chained. for example..
1 possibility (snake)…
C D E F
B A 9 8
4 5 6 7
3 2 1 0
or are you driving multiple rows/columns via separate data buss (pins)
Anyhow, I love the project, I can’t wait to play around with it and hang it up in my workshop for inspiration.