Maniacal Labs

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.

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.

First of all, the AllPixel Kickstarter has been going great! Fully funded in less than 48 hours, chosen as a Kickstarter Staff Pick on the third day, and currently at over 130% funded and 150 backers… with 26 days left! We didn’t want to bog down the main page with really technical details about how the AllPixel works, but we thought we should give some more background. The Hardware At the core, the AllPixel is not much different from devices like the Arduino Leonardo, Arduino Pro Micro, or Teensy 2.

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.

We’ve been a little quiet lately. But have no fear, it’s only so that we could focus 100% on our next great endeavor. 1 year of work. 7 prototypes. But oh, so many pixels. Something awesome coming on November 9th. Stay tuned.

I had a 24-led NeoPixel ring lying around being useless, so I decided to make it do something less useless. As is typical, it became a clock. Not an original idea, sure. But these rings are well-suited for clockification. The blue ‘seconds’ lights will fade around the ring once per minute. There’s some mapping logic to determine where the green ‘minutes’ light should go. Hours is straightforward enough if the clock is showing 24hr time.

Not much today. Just a pair of videos from some testing I’ve been doing with the MSGEQ7 Graphic Equalizer Display Filter chip. The first one shows the waveform of the analog output of the chip. The second video shows what happens when you take that output and parse it out to a bunch of LPD8806 lights. If these experiments go any further, I’ll do a more in-depth post with code and schematics and stuff.

Now this is just plain cool. And insane. Every once in a while I see a project that really makes me question how much I know about electronics design and this is certainly one of them. Instead of a microprocessor, or even plain-old discrete transistors, all of the logic of this clock is accomplished with nothing more than neon lamps. Whaaaat? I won’t even try to explain, but let the designer explain over on his site.

A friend asked me a few days ago if I knew of a way to remotely monitor multiple different points of temperature, log the data, and generate an email alert if sensor reading went out of bounds. Since I happened to have a ‘project-in-progress’ with just that goal, I decided I should finish it. Or, rather, get it to a working state. QTP_Complete

Not much for today, just a few pics from my build of this nifty kit from Sparkfun: FG085 MiniDDS Function Generator. I figure an inexpensive function generator would be a good idea to buy first and see how much I actually use it before sinking bigger bucks into a piece of full-on test gear. Overall, I’m happy with this kit, aside from a few minor quirks here and there. No show-stoppers though.