Greg Valvo made a persistence of vision (POV) project using a inexpensive box fan and 36 DotStar LEDs (APA102).

Greg wrote the library for the POV display using Teensy 3.2 board and Adafuit DotStar LEDs (APA102).  The library is configured to support up to 48 LEDs in the string and up to 512 angular positions (~0.7 degree resolution).

Code and schematics for the project can be found on GitHub.