I suppose this is a bit late starting to log; but better late than never.

The progress that has been made so far is developing the PCB for the WS2812's that will be used for the discrete pixels. This has been developed over the course of learning how to use KiCad. I sent these off to OSHPark ~ 4 weeks ago, and after USPS screwed up the first order; I finally got the boards. Things I noticed with the design (see the github link) is that I did not leave enough space to solder the LED's effectively, so the first attempt at soldering was.. botched at best. The header drill holes also are not large enough for the headers I purchased; but this made me think to replace these headers with a SMT variant; such that I can decrease the size further.