We looked at using a Raspberry Pi but instead settled on an mbed FRDM-KL25Z so we had more control over the signal timing. The trade-off was that the KL25Z only had 16KB memory instead of the Pi's 512MB, so getting everything to fit took a bit of creativity and a few late nights...
We built a similar WS2812b array at university for an embedded systems design project: https://github.com/joe-wright/wiisel
We looked at using a Raspberry Pi but instead settled on an mbed FRDM-KL25Z so we had more control over the signal timing. The trade-off was that the KL25Z only had 16KB memory instead of the Pi's 512MB, so getting everything to fit took a bit of creativity and a few late nights...