A site dedicated to Twichels, and things they (ok mostly me) are interested in.

WS2811 chip

Ebay score - fifty WS2811 chips on a board

WS2811 LED driver as used in the Larson Scanner project:

These are also available from Adafruit as individual surface mount chips. I found this board of fifty chips with some support circuitry, (a cap and resistor?) all placed and soldered. The downside was the board had no perforations. To cut them apart I had to use a Dremel and some patience. A second issue that took some hacking was the R and G on the silkscreened RGB were reversed. I also found the Do and Di (Data Out, and Data In) were also reversed. This is easily fixed once you are aware of it, but a pain in the meantime. There also exist WS2812 and WS2812B chips that have different pinouts than the WS2811. This may be an explanation as to how my boards ended up the way they did. I do think the silkscreen should have compensated for that though.

The bottom line is, they were cheap, they work, I'm happy with the result. Oh, I also have 49 of 'em left to play with.