Maniacal Labs
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New Library: ESP Serial WiFi Manager
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Thank You GeekSpark and SparkCon!
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Arduino-Based "Analog" Slow Cooker Controller
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From the Forum: Gazebo Lighting Prototype
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BiblioPixel Controlling a Jumbotron...
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The ESP8266: Taking the New Hotness for a Spin
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Adafruit Matrix Hat Support for BiblioPixel
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More Fun With the AllPixel and TinyTiM
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FFT Audio Animation with BiblioPixel and the AllPixel
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Weekend Project: POVStick
The ESP8266 Arduino package provides a great and familiar to use ecosystem for developing code on the chip. However, most examples for WiFi network connection and management involve building and uploading new code every time you want to change the network settings. That’s just more than should be required if you want to simply connect an existing and complete project to a new network. A forthcoming project in which we plan to use a large number of the Adafruit ESP8266 Feather boards for was going to be far to cumbersome to manage if we had to upload new code not only to change the WiFi network but to set static IPs.
Read more…SparkCon_Thanks A Huge Thanks to everyone who came out and saw us at GeekSpark this weekend! We had a great time and were thrilled at the response we got from the giant display. If you want to know more about the AllPixel LED driver and the BiblioPixel Python library that were used to make the display, check out the AllPixel Info Page.
Read more…IMG_0884_SM I had two options: One required me to spend money. The other cost me nothing and gave me an opportunity to make something useful. To make a short story longer, I have an “analog” slow cooker (just a dial on the front) and I wanted the ability to set the cooking time and temperature.
Read more…[landgrvi] has been posting in the Maniacal Labs forum about some awesome gazebo lighting he has been working on. He’s using the new LEDCircle class to run some really neat circular animations. Check out this awesome small scale prototype!
… sub-panel. Couldn’t resist the mild click-bait there :) As you can see in the video above; no, not a full-on jumbotron, but just a single 32x32 panel designed for digital billboards. I’ve had one sitting in my parts drawer for nearly a year… But yesterday, the awesome 1-Pixel PacMan post on HackADay gave me enough of a push to finally pull it out and get hacking.
Read more…ESP8266 You’ve probably heard about this little module by now; a cheap, wifi-enabled bit of wizardry that is all the rage. Using serial communication, you can talk to the device and send commands out to the interwebs.
Read more…So, last week, Adafruit launched this little beauty. Having just acquired a handful of Pi B+ and A+ boards and already having a 32x32 matrix that I’d been meaning to use, this was a complete insta-buy™. And, of course, I had to make it work with BiblioPixel! Well, it showed up last night and the coding commenced! Fortunately, Adafruit already had a library ready to go with a handy python wrapper, since the main code is all C.
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…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…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.
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