Maniacal Labs
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ThinkGeek Wooden Clock Build
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Single Board Linux Computer Rundown
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More Fun With the AllPixel and TinyTiM
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Binary Epoch Christmas Tree
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FFT Audio Animation with BiblioPixel and the AllPixel
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Sharing Among the Community
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POVStick - Setup and Test Video
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Weekend Project: POVStick
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AllPixel Week 1 Update
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We've Kicked It!
What’s this?! Wood?! There’s not even any lights!! True, but it was a fun build, and I might put some kind of light-up something or other on/near it, but I really like how it looks by itself. Anything added would only be to accent it. For now, here it is; working. Most of the time. The above video is the result of a few days work putting together this awesome wooden clock kit from ThinkGeek.
Read more…Happy New Year! While one of the many reasons we created the AllPixel was to be able to control LED strips from “traditional” desktops and laptops (with the extra processing power they provide), we are always on the lookout for something smaller and cheaper that can just be left in a project. We talked a lot about the ever popular Raspberry Pi and Beagle Bone Black, but as this list from LinuxGizmos.
Read more…As a follow-on to our previous article on the TiM and TinyTiM displays from WyoLum, I wanted to demonstrate some of the flexibility of the AllPixel in terms of how well it can pair with already existing products. The TinyTim is an as-yet-unreleased product from WyoLum, but it will be dropping soon. It’s really a slick board, consisting of 64 WS2812 LEDs arranged in an 8x8 grid. There are plenty of connections on the back of the PCB to easily wire together multiple displays, in either parallel or serial data transfer configurations.
Read more…So I have 15 meters of LPD8806 programmable LED lights on my fake Christmas tree. But I feel I can up the Nerd quotient even more. Inspired by the Binary Epoch Clock kit, I added an animation to the tree that turns it into a giant unreadable binary clock. The lights are controlled by a RasPi running the BiblioPixel library, with the AllPixel making the hardware interfacing a snap. Unix epoch time (number of seconds since 12:00am Jan 1 1970) is represented in binary notation.
Read more…We showed off this fun little piece of code in the AllPixel Kickstarter introduction video, but never really got into the details of how that audio animation really worked. The animation in the introduction video and the video above uses a Fast Fourier Transform to analyze the audio coming into the computer’s mic/line-in and generate an intensity map for various frequency ranges in the audio signal. FFT is some really hardcore math, so instead of trying to explain the details of how it, and the python code, works see this post (and it’s links) on the blog of Scott Harden.
Read more…We already knew that the open source and open hardware community was full of awesome people, but launching the AllPixel Kickstarter has just confirmed that even more. There has been an outpouring of support and advice that will certainly be helpful as we move through the final manufacturing steps. What has been really cool is that some other open hardware makers like us have been super excited to see how their hardware works with the AllPixel.
Read more…[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVkrJvPa0ow[/embed] Just a short video showing some of the setup and testing of the POVStick, and the results of a very cold night walking around the back yard with a blinking stick. For more info, check out the AllPixel and this blog post.
To showcase how much the AllPixel and BiblioPixel can simplify your projects, we wanted to put together a fun project that really highlighted their versatility. So we decided to build a persistence of vision light painter, or POVStick as we keep calling it. The POVStick consists of 2 meters of 48 LED/m LPD8806 strips, for a total of 96 pixels vertical resolution. This is controlled by an AllPixel connected to a Raspberry Pi B+ with a USB WiFi module.
Read more…It has been an amazing first week! 21 Days to go and we are already at over 200% funding. Thanks so much to all our supporters! We’ve also announced some new stretch goals, so check those out. We feel certain we will hit the first goal in no time! One of the coolest things so far though is that we were featured on the Atmel blog! It’s a great honor to get some recognition from such an awesome company.
Read more…We’re proud to announce our first Kickstarter! We’ve been quietly preparing this for months and can’t wait to see what everyone thinks. Check out the Kickstarter page for all the juicy details.