Hi,
For the 2019 season, we would like to use the RIO for RGB leds. we thought that because the RIO has DIO and PWM, that we would be able to use the RGB leds without adding an arduino to the robot.
do you think its possible? and if so, where do we begin?
its a ws2812
You may be able to do this (with resistors to bump the voltage down to LED levels) via the RIOs PWM. Since the RIO has many of the same style pins that the arduino has (both PWM and DIO) it would make controlling (but maybe not powering) LEDs possible and easy.
We have done this the past two years; you can see the code we used to accomplish it here. We used solenoids and a PCM for our LEDs. One caveat is that all LEDs on the strip have to be the same color in our case.
Or you could use this LED driver which accepts PWM to change the LEDS.