I am using an Arduino Uno R3 to control my Christmas lights (a strand of 665 WS2812B LEDs).The Arduino, while driving the LEDs, is not accessible from my PC, so I am attempting to use a Raspberry Pi 3 with VNC installed to control it remotely, and update the Arduino code on demand. I planned to use the Raspberry Pi's GPIO pins to run a series of sensors. However, I am experiencing issues when compiling code from the Raspberry Pi and I am just a few bytes short on the Arduino's SRAM.
The Raspberry Pi is incapable of running the WS2812B strand due to its strict timing. In a different project, I used the Raspberry Pi to drive a LPD8806 strand directly but that strand was out of budget for this project. I already have 665 WS2812B LEDs wired in a single strand and mounted on my house. My problem is that the last 15 LEDs are not working and I cannot reliably change the light pattern remotely.
What is a good Microcontroller or SBC that could either replace the Arduino Uno and be controlled by the Pi or could replace both? The solution needs to be able to drive a continuous strand of 700 WS2812B LEDs, be controlled over a network, and run off of a 5V power supply. Preferably, this solution would have enough resources to also measure a series of sensors over GPIO pins, and be cheap. All of the alternatives I have found either lack some functionality, or are far more expensive than my current setup.
Edit: The Teensy++ 2.0 is the only 5V board I could find that has more RAM than the Arduino Uno, without getting more expensive. I would be willing to pay more for a card that also had some networking built in. Does anyone know if the Teensy++ 2.0 will work with my project or know of a card that will?
