The LPD8806 LED strip is a digitally-addressable RGB LED strip that can receive instructions using the SPI protocol. This type of strip is one of the most customizable available as you can control the colors of each of the available LEDs individually using 21 bit colors per LED.

Galileo is great for this task since it has a native SPI controller (only actuates as master) available. This way, you don't need to bit-bang the GPIO pins, simulating the hardware behavior through software, which consumes more CPU usage when compared to the hardware option.

Common serial ports communicate asynchronously since there is no control over data transmission as the same transfer rates are being used. The SPI controller works differently. Being a synchronous data bus, it uses two different lines—one for data and the other for a clock signal. The clock signal will tell the receiver when it should start looking at the transmitted data. This is an interesting protocol since it can be used...