Bucking the downward trend [HansLuijten] provides an astoundingly thorough set of LED strip patterns in his comprehensive post titled Arduino LED strip effects.

You can fade out and fade in the light of an LED automatically by using Arduino and a simple code that is described below. Even though the Arduino board cannot output variable voltage on its digital ...

At first glance, an Arduino library for LED control might seem superfluous, but if you are interested in nice effects, the coding for them can be a bit onerous.