@faziban I agonized as to whether to include a level shifter or not. I wanted to the board to be easily assembled with no SMD parts. The level shifter you are using is overkill and expensive IMO. Its better to use two cheap level-shifting high output current AND gates like the SN74AHCT1G08 like @Pixelmatix used in his APA102 driver board. These could be hand soldered or reflowed on the board.
I may make the changes myself. Regardless, I will share the kicad design on github so you can you and others can make changes and then do pull requests so others can benefit.
@shanevanj, the Gen3 devices don’t have the horsepower nor the hardware assets available to support RGB panels. The bit-banged approach used on the Photon code is very colour limited due to the processing overhead. A dedicated STM32, ESP32 or RPi would provide better performance but without all the Particle goodies.
That is one of the reasons why I am working on a hardware accelerated solution that will support RGB matrix panels, Neopixel strings and matrices and a whole bunch of other things but it needs to cook for a while yet.