RGBW LED strip: which components are required?
NeoPixels

The strips based on the WS2812 / SK6812 and similar chips, known by some as NeoPixels, are clever ways of implementing fully-addressable 24-bit colour LEDs.

One of the clever things is that they only require one data wire, plus power and Gnd, i.e.


+5V
Data
Gnd


The pixel information is sent by precisely timed sequences of 24 bits per pixel. The first pixel "peels off" these 24 bits (ie. 3 x red / green / blue) and then passes the rest on to the next pixel, and so on.

Libraries

Various people have written libraries to do this for you including:


Adafruit library
NeoPixels Revealed: How to (not need to) generate precisely timed signals
My own library which uses SPI


Power

Each pixel draws around 60 mA at maximum brightness (showing white) so you need to allow for a heavy-duty power supply. Particularly if you have 5m of 144 pixels/m then that is 720 pixels, which would require 43.2 amps!

According to Adafruit:


  To estimate power supply needs, multiply the number of pixels by 20, then divide the result by 1,000 for the “rule of thumb” power supply rating in Amps.


Even that means you need 14.4 amps for your 720 pixels!

So bear that in mind when sizing your power supply.

Addressing methods

The Adafruit library (as far as I can tell) holds the pixel information in RAM, and then "dumps" it to the NeoPixels in one operation. This lets you do fancy things in memory, and copy the results to the pixels. However that means you need enough RAM for all this. At 3 bytes per pixel (24 bits), if you have 720 pixels, that will be 2160 bytes, which is more RAM than the smaller processors (like the Uno) have.

Larger processors (like the Mega) have more RAM.

An alternative method, as explained here does not keep the data in RAM, but generates the colours "procedurally" on-the-fly. This is much less RAM-intensive, but perhaps less flexible. On that page he links to a YouTube video which shows a humble Arduino Duemilanove (similar to a Uno) driving over 1000 pixels!

Procedural generation however can do quite a lot, for example you can set the entire string to a single colour, change that rapidly, or make a rainbow effect by increasing (say) the red value for each successive pixel. You can also make "chaser" effects quite simply.

The library I wrote is also designed to allow you to use minimal RAM. You could conceivably add in your own storage scheme, perhaps only storing one byte per pixel, with less bits per colour (eg. 2 bits each for red, green, blue) and that would reduce RAM requirements by a third.

Cabling run

You could try sending the data over 2m. I warn you that the timing for a zero-bit is that it has to go HIGH and then LOW within about 400 ns, so you can't afford to have the data signal degrade too much.

When I had a similar string of coloured LEDs set up at Xmas time (not NeoPixels however) I had a long run of a 5V power supply (just using a pair of figure-8 wire), and situated the processor quite close to the pixels. This is probably the safest way of doing it.