Distributed power injection and "CC" strips. The CC chips in the segments provide constant current to the segments allowing the voltage drop along the strip. If you inject to infrequently, the drop will be high and the chips in the feed end will dissipate a lot of heat, so it's likely you will be servicing those ends. Feed more frequently and you'll avoid this. WS281x usually have seperate shift registers inside, so they usually have no signal degradation--theoretically. In practice, recommended you segments feed those signals, but can be much longer depends on the number of nodes and the size of your controller frame buffer.
Comments
Distributed power injection and "CC" strips. The CC chips in the segments provide constant current to the segments allowing the voltage drop along the strip. If you inject to infrequently, the drop will be high and the chips in the feed end will dissipate a lot of heat, so it's likely you will be servicing those ends. Feed more frequently and you'll avoid this. WS281x usually have seperate shift registers inside, so they usually have no signal degradation--theoretically. In practice, recommended you segments feed those signals, but can be much longer depends on the number of nodes and the size of your controller frame buffer.