Maniacal Labs

Last night, we got some really disappointing news; Maker Faire North Carolina will not be happening this year :( Last year’s faire was an exceptional experience and the AllPixel may not have happened without it. Having been planning for and looking forward to exhibiting at the 2015 faire since the moment the 2014 one ended, this was horribly crushing to hear. But as they explain on their website, it was not an easy decision, but simply became more than the organizers could handle in their spare time.

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.

It is a bit crazy to see how far we’ve come since Maniacal Labs started by launching the Binary Epoch Clock back in 2013. Well, unlike the quick success we’ve had with the AllPixel, we just recently sold out of the Epoch Clock kits. But that allowed us to do something we’ve wanted to for some time now… ditch our web store and redesign the site. So we hope you like the new, cleaner design!

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.

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.

KermitFlail Thank you SO MUCH to all of our amazing backers! We couldn’t be happier with how well the AllPixel campaign went! Now… the hard work begins. We’ve already started working with Seeed Studio to begin the manufacturing process and hope to have the rewards out to everyone even before our April timeline.

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.

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.

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.

[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.