Yeah, the WS2812 does have a fairly unique interface, but at 45¢ for an RGB LED with a built in constant current driver, it's pretty much the cheapest option per LED. Other options I've seen like the A6281 are $2 for just the driver itself, without the LED.
Since there are probably going to be at least a few dozen LEDs, the per LED cost can add up quickly, so I'm fine with spending a bit more on a more powerful microcontroller or FPGA and learning a new system. And of course, part of the goal is to learn new things and have fun with the project, so some of these new highly parallel microcontrollers like the GA144, Propeller, XMOS, or even an FPGA would be more interesting to work with than a standard PIC, even if they may technically be overkill.
This is the first time I've done hardware hacking in a while; the last time I did it I used a 68008 as my microcontroller. So I'm hoping to find something that will be interesting to learn, not too hard to use, and capable of everything I'm going to throw at it, so I don't have to go through several iterations of buying expensive development boards only to discover that I can't drive my dot matrix display or I can only drive half of the playfield LEDs that I need or that interrupts from the flipper buttons cause my LED color fades to flicker since they screwed up the timing of my signal to the driver or something of the sort.
One of the problems is that since there are so many choices, and I haven't done hardware hacking in a while, I don't have a good sense of what I'll be able to do yet. Maybe I should start small, with an Arduino or a PIC or something of the sort, and move up if I discover that that can't do something that I want.
Coming back into the hardware world after being away for several years, I find the ARM Cortexen pretty damn compelling for the possibility to do the high level programming in something besides C. And a STM32F4 Discovery board is only ~$15.
(And yeah, I feel dirty for blowing up a GreenArrays thread with a suggestion for a more traditional microcontroller, especially not having really studied the GA chip.)
Since there are probably going to be at least a few dozen LEDs, the per LED cost can add up quickly, so I'm fine with spending a bit more on a more powerful microcontroller or FPGA and learning a new system. And of course, part of the goal is to learn new things and have fun with the project, so some of these new highly parallel microcontrollers like the GA144, Propeller, XMOS, or even an FPGA would be more interesting to work with than a standard PIC, even if they may technically be overkill.
This is the first time I've done hardware hacking in a while; the last time I did it I used a 68008 as my microcontroller. So I'm hoping to find something that will be interesting to learn, not too hard to use, and capable of everything I'm going to throw at it, so I don't have to go through several iterations of buying expensive development boards only to discover that I can't drive my dot matrix display or I can only drive half of the playfield LEDs that I need or that interrupts from the flipper buttons cause my LED color fades to flicker since they screwed up the timing of my signal to the driver or something of the sort.
One of the problems is that since there are so many choices, and I haven't done hardware hacking in a while, I don't have a good sense of what I'll be able to do yet. Maybe I should start small, with an Arduino or a PIC or something of the sort, and move up if I discover that that can't do something that I want.