DIY RGB mechanical keyboard (from scratch)

[MarcWWolfe]

Anybody have advice of any kind for using an Arduino Nano (or anything else) as an RGB controller?
It will control RGB without relying on the Teensy controller (meaning there will likely be two USB cables, but whatever). If I can figure it out, I'll have the Teensy tell the Arduino to turn RGB on/off by just pulling a pin high or low, but that's it. Any advice or links to resources are appreciated. I'm looking for something that will make this as simple as "Easy AVR" makes it to program the Teensy 2.0. I plan to have some basic presets (like rainbow wave) as well as the option to have a PC controll the RGB so one key can be a HDD indicator, one row can indicate GPU temp, one row can indicate CPU temp, one row for percentage of RAM used etc.
Even some suggestions about doing everything with cmd line and some batch files or something for sending the system specs to the controller. I'm a noob with this stuff.
If anyone is curious, this is the layout I'm going with. It's like a more gamer friendly OLKB Preonic. https://twitter.com/MarcWWolfe/status/933194461596626944

[Tomdein]

Hello, I am also trying to create a RGB mechanical keyboard from scratch. I don't believe it cannot be done!

Here is my progress:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/110732764816276953843/posts/ez98t5pUWbY

Driving all the LEDs from the USB can be a little tricky (only 500ma on USB 2 ports). Maybe you can hook up 2 USBs for the power.

But I can recommend you to use IS31FL3733 (http://www.issi.com/WW/pdf/IS31FL3733.pdf). I get them from arrow.com
It's a 192 LEDs (12×16) in dot matrix driver.
It uses I2C.

And DO NOT put the LEDs UPSDIDE DOWN like I did

I hope you can progress with your project now.
GL & HF

[Deefenestrate]

And DO NOT put the LEDs UPSDIDE DOWN like I did

LOL

[TalkingTree]

Hello and welcome both of you gentlemen.

You didn't specify what form factor your keyboards are gonna be but, nevertheless, you might wanna have a look at IBNobody's RGB TKL project which is open hardware.