[Brett] had been intrigued by some of the attempts to bend hardware SPI to the will of the WS2811 — notably [Cunning_Fellow’s] work featured in this post. He took it a great step forward by ...

[Leo] looked at the WS2811 LED driver ... came up with is deceptively simple — just four transistors, a Schottky diode, and a bunch of passives. The other clever bit is the data interface ...