You've no doubt heard of Arduino by now, but there's no great shame if you don't know much more beyond that. And if you're curious, Bob from I Like to Make Stuff has a great, quick, just-the-basics ...

[Andrew] wrote in with a new take on the classic persistence of vision bike spoke hack. While many of these POV setups use custom PCBs and discrete LEDs, [Andrew]’s design uses readily available ...