The general concept 

The main part of the electronics is a Sparkfun ESP32 board. 

To control the LEDs, levelshifters converting the 3.3V signals from the ESP to the 5V of the APA102 LEDs are used. 

ESP32

The ESP32 is a small low cost microcontroller with some peripherals and built-in WLAN support. It can be programmed using the Arduino toolchain.