Controlling a nano and ws2812's with a Raspberry Pi3

[siblues]

I ordered a few parts for my Octoprint set up.I had a few questions regarding controlling a 1 meter strip of leds for my printer using a Arduino nano controlled by the Pi.I am going to be using a 5v 4 relay board.I am very new to all of this so please bare with me.The leds are currently working just fine with the Nano alone.I was wondering if it would be as easy as just Interrupting the 5v wire on the leds with the relay and a 470uf resistor to make the leds turn on and off easily?I also was wondering if the colors can be changed using the Pi to send the changes through the Nano?I have seen a few examples online of people plugging the nano into a usb port but was wondering if the color change can be accomplished with the GPIO on the Pi.Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Gosse Adema]

There is a manual on Adafruit. I've got this one working on a Raspberry Pi 3. No Arduino required, you can use the GPIO ports.

https://learn.adafruit.com/neopixels-on ... i/overview

The library is on GitHub: https://github.com/jgarff/rpi_ws281x
Don't forget to look at the examples in the python directory.

[siblues]

I will take a look at that and thanks for the help.I was just thinking of using the Nano as a slave because I know it already works just fine and I was under the impression that it would make wiring to the Pi simpler since it would probably only need 1 or two wires to either open or close the power to the led's.I may be totally wrong but that is what I have gathered.I also have more than ten Nano's laying around so it wouldn't cost me anything to use one.