I purchased 5m of addressable RGB LED Light strip based on the HL1606 IC. Official information is hard to come by, the only available datasheet is poorly translated from Chinese. Luckily more than a few folks have already spent some time to figure it all out. It is fairly simple to control, basically each data byte will control 1 LED, sending the next byte shifts the first byte to the next LED and the first LED uses the new byte. And so on, 2 data bytes are taken in by the HL1606 and used to control the LEDs, when a new byte is received the oldest one is shifted out to the next HL1606.

Adafruit.com has some great info and some sample Arduino libraries on it. Link Here Including the datasheet in Engrish. Being that I don't use Arduino, I couldn't use the library, but whats the point of using something if you don't know how it really works. So I wrote up some programs in Microchip C18 utilizing the 18F series of chips, very powerful, up to 64mhz from Internal oscillator, varying choices of hardware peripherals and cheap. A nice part about C18 is if you write your code the right way, it will work on most any 18F chip with very little editing. I chose to use a 18F14K22, which has given me some problems on other programs, but will work fine for this project.

Some Links that Helped out a lot:
Alan's Ramblings - Great simplified Info
Alan's Ramblings - Continuation
Adafruit Tutorial - Arduino based
Datasheet - Hosted by Adafruit.com
This Instructable was maybe the First

Included is just the main.c, create a project in MPLAB for your 18F PIC of choice, add .c file to "Source Files", add the Linker file, and change the "#include < p18f14k22.h >" in main.c to point to the PIC being used.

Serial Demo Program: simple program waits for serial data at 19200 baud. Sending 1-8 will shift in a color(Red - Green - Blue - Yellow - Teal - Purple - White - Off). Sending "a" will divide a 5m string into 6 color groups, Rainbow. Sending "z" will start a 7 color shift. Sending a new byte will stop the 7 color shift.

*This is a preliminary program, I hope to upload a new version with Fade control and more functions soon.

Project Files v.1	Download
Buy Some HL1606 LED Strip	The Store