Replacing backlight in monitor with LED strips

TL;DR version: Bought LED strip set to replace backlight in monitor. It didn't quite work, and need to replace/upgrade it. Rather short of funds right now.

The backlight in our Dell 3007WFP recently died, and I thought it appropriate to replace it with an LED strip. I bought a Commercial Electric 18 foot LED strip kit, UPC 802513165081. The good news is, I was able to determine the backlight driver ran off of 24 volts, and the strip kit ran off of 24 as well.

Upon initial testing, I was able to segment the strips into 1 foot lengths, and the 18 segments spaced relatively well.

However, I ran into two major issues:

The "pitch" was 1/4 as "coarse" as it needed to be (meaning I needed 4x as many LED "dots" as I had).
Due to my bad handling of the strips, I accidentally killed several of them.

I now need 35 feet of high-density 24V LED strips, in one-foot segments.

There's one major problem: upon searching, there are no commercially available strips identical to the ones I had before: one 24-volt line, one serial-controlled RGB line, one white-control (0-24V variable) line, and the ground line.

What I want to do is two things:

Convert the controller into a solid 3-lane 24V controller (I will need to definitely build and design new software and hardware)
See if it's possible to tap into the monitor's built-in serial line to control brightness from the front panel

Here's the pic of the currnent controller board (and the components I have to work with):

There is an IR receiver on the back as well. Might be able to develop an Android app to adjust RGB values, and remotely control backlight as well, with the new board and programming...

Microcontroller is an ATMEL 8S003F3P6, for easy Googling.

Now, due to me job-searching (another several-month issue in of itself), I am currently very low on funds, so the best I can do right now is prepare for when I can buy them (or acquire a sponsorship, somehow).