I'm trying to come up with the best design for a project requiring between 1000 and 5000 individually-addressable LEDs, not in a strip, grid, ribbon, pegboard, etc. configuration. There is a lot of information about LED strips and arrays, but those don't seem directly applicable to my project.
What I want to do is similar to a "pick to light" system seen in warehouses, if you're familiar with that. I will have a room with many storage locations (various sizes) in it. I will have software that keeps track of what is in those locations, and when a user searches for one (either to remove or add one), the LED above the bin will light.
I need to support having an arbitrary set of the LEDs on at any given time — it's not just one at a time (though realistically I'd expect well under 1/4 would ever be on at once). The bins will range from 3 inches to several feet apart, and the room will be on the order of 15 feet square, with storage locations spread throughout.
Reliability, a nice clean installation and ease of setup are more important than cost. Of course, all things being equal, lower cost is better — it's just not the top priority.
Best Answer
This sounds like it might be a good application for a 1-Wire® bus, using something like a DS2413 to control every LED or two, at least if those parts were a bit cheaper. Otherwise, your best bet may be to attach each LED to a small microcontroller, and use a simple unidirectional communications scheme to send data to all the controllers. Using a unidirectional scheme would facilitate the construction of very simple repeaters (simple non-inverting buffers would probably suffice). Each microcontroller could use a small amount of flash or EEPROM to hold an address, so all devices could be individually addressed independently. The biggest difficulty might be configuring the network; that might be best facilitated by having each controller include a command to output its address by modulating its light output. An optical receiver attached to a portable computer could be used to visit each node, read its light pattern, and make note of its physical location.