SunriseLight VS FastLED

Redshift has code to calculate that locally which I use in my sunrise light project

Since then I've made lots of things like audio amplifiers and effects, motor controllers, 3d printer controllers and firmware (and subsequently smoothieboard), muscle stimulators, bluetooth LED strip controllers, etc

Here's a bluetooth RGB strip controller I made a couple years ago if you want an example.

hackaday.com has a zillion links to examples; here's one two three four of mine and I've also got a laundry list of companies I've helped but whose technical details I can't legally publish (note that I've assisted many but not all of the companies in that link)

eg for this project my available inputs were intermittent 12v power, bluetooth, and the current time and location; and the desired output was 3× high current low-side switches that produced 12v RGB PWM corresponding to the colour temperature and brightness of the sky - so we need a bluetooth microcontroller, battery backup to keep time when 12v is absent, some battery management which wanted 5v in, a 12v buck to feed it, some MOSFETs, and redshift or similar code to plug into things.

Here's one I made earlier although it targets NRF52 and doesn't use Arduino libraries.

I've got a similar project here, and most of the complication is for battery management - the actual LED strip drive is even simpler than yours because I chose MOSFETs that work nicely with 3v3 gate voltage :P

If you're curious here's a couple of my AVR projects (not using Arduino libraries at all), and here's an NRF52 one

I guess my Sunrise Light project could have been built on Arduino's libraries since an NRF52 core exists, but I didn't do that…

For example, this old project of mine uses an NRF52832 (which is substantially similar to the '840, just missing USB) and it offers several services and characteristics including a battery level service, a DFU service, and a custom service for actually controlling it.

I used the examples from here https://github.com/FastLED/FastLED/wiki/Multiple-Controller-Examples

Sweet. Then pretty much any arduino or other microcontroller would take care of what you need. The strips only take one output pin plus power and ground so just about everything will work for driving them. They act like a long shift register so the single pin is all that's needed to load the full strip with whatever patterns you want regardless of the length. You just have to tell it how many LEDs there are in total is all. Check out the FastLED library. You can learn more about it there and/or install the library in the IDE by pressing "ctrl shift I" for windows or "command shift I" for mac and search for it in the upper search area and install it right there. It comes with working examples too so all you would have to do is install the library, load one of the new example sketches that came with it, and probably edit the example to change the NUM_LEDS count to match what you're working with.