I've been looking around for what seems to be the most optimal solution to balance battery performance with the size and demand of the boards.
I have an ATmega1284 board here that I've not played with yet. After looking around it seems like I could reasonably make an 8 segment blade with 120mmx8mm 12v 3w pieces running a modified version of LSOS. They are cool white, but they'd fit in a thick wall dayblade. I'm not sure if that's ideal for making a colored blade, but perhaps an interesting experiment. These would only pull about 6a in parallel at full power, so this should be manageable for a 3x18650 setup. It could even be made a 6 segment blade powered by a DIYino making the first two segments being two long and use the existing LSOS code (or even a CF-LS). Since the battery pack will either be a short and fat LiPo or long and slender LiIon pack, There's plenty of room to put in 6 or 8 transistors without the need for extra PWMs.