wokwi-features VS led-2d-spiral

No, no - I have a half a dozen RPi's of varying revisions. Since they run Linux and the SDcards are less than robust, anytime you accidentially trip the power (which to me happens several times during hardware debugging sessions) you risk scrambling the rootfs and thus need to reflash a new SDcard. Some SDcards get damaged.

I recommend using Arduino and/or Wokwi (https://wokwi.com/) to get started.

More Wokwi Integration: Wokwi is an amazing embedded simulator and is great for getting started quickly. For a learner, there's no need for toolchain setup or even the purchase of hardware. There are many features as well that make it quite a flexible tool supporting a lot of features right from the browser. Users can also vote for more features. Still maybe at some point, one might want to tinker with physical hardware. However, at that point, they would have gained some confidence first. Currently, only ESP boards are supported with Rust on Wokwi. I hope for the variety to expand soon.

In addition to the other great suggestions here I wanted to point out that you can practice and learn a lot for free using an online simulator such as wokwi.com and tinkercad.com (among others)! And you don't have to buy an Arduino or any parts to get started!

And you can prototype all of this first to get it working for free using an online simulator at sites like wokwi.com or tinkercad.com!

If you don't have the budget for real hardware consider the simulator at https://wokwi.com/ It works with Rust (at least for ESP32, haven't tried other architectures). Bonus: you can't blow up the electronics by a wiring mistake.

I spent a bit of time today with a few FastLED programs and uploaded them to wokwi.com on a simulated Arduino Nano and a WS2812 strip of 64 LED's (not in a 2D matrix). The chatgpt requests I made were:

https://tinyurl.com/yr34sym6

https://wokwi.com/ is great for simple, digital only stuff.

https://fritzing.org/ will kind of lay out the PCB for you, but it's kind of a pain in the ass.

Wokwi and Fritzing are more "Breadboard Simulators" than real circuit simulators, but they do have their place.

Another cool thing you may want to try is making a simulator https://wokwi.com/

Perhaps you're better at webdev than I am. As I understand it, if you have the X & Y coordinates of the LEDs you should be able to add them to a customView in the sim. Like this. Add "customView": "https://wokwi.github.io/led-2d-spiral" to the top-level of diagram.json in the sim.