Maniacal Labs

I’m in the middle of designing a new Maniacal Labs product (more on that in another post) and have been working with a library intended for the ATMega328 but need it working on an ATTiny4313. If you ever feel cramped for flash space while working on an Arduino project, try out the ATTiny series of chips and you will quickly feel like 32KB of flash is downright massive! The ATTiny4313 is a decently capable chip, with only 5 less I/O pins than the ATMega328 but a somewhat less proportional 4KB of flash.

First of all, many thanks to those who supported our PrismaChron Tindie fundraiser! Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough interest in this particular project to reach our funding goal. So we won’t, at this time, be making the PrismaChron, but it was not a worthless experience for us. We learned a great deal in the process. While crowd-funding didn’t work out this time, we still see great potential in it, given the right product.

Good news! Paypal is no longer the only option to purchase our kits! We’ve gotten some feedback that, even though you don’t have to have a PayPal account to checkout in our store, not everyone is keen on the purchase being processed by them. So, effective immediately, you can pay directly via all major credit cards. For the security concerned, have no fear, our checkout process is fully protected by SSL encryption and even we don’t have direct access to any of your credit card information as it’s all handled by our processor, Stripe.

First of all, many, many thanks to those who have supported the PrismaChron already! It’s been an interesting first week and we’re part of the way there, but we still have a ways to go. Unfortunately, if we don’t hit the minimum number of pre-orders, we won’t be able to make the kits cost effective. So we are asking for a little more of your help. If you can, please share the following link on the social media of your choosing: https://www.

As Seen on Adafruit Many thanks to Adafruit for letting us show off our new PrismaChron on tonight’s Show-And-Tell! Check it out in the video below at about 7 minutes in (it should go straight to it).

Designing the PrismaChron was actually kind of easy compared to naming it. We went through a few: Rainbow Clock Color Clock ChromaChron ChronoChroma Color Time ChromataChron LumiChron HueTime ChronoChrome ColorChron ChronBow ChronoChromatic SpectraChron Spectrum Clock RGBTime Many more variations on this theme. Many of them were ruled out pretty quickly with a quick web search. SpectraChron, for example was dangerously close to SpectraCron (no “h”) which was a trademarked brand of paint.

The PrismaChron (not its first name, more on that in another post) has been in the works for quite a long time. Longer even than the Binary Epoch Clock. We’ve spent that time truly fine-tuning every little aspect of it in an effort to make it a fantastic little kit that we can be proud of. Being a clock that displays its time as color, getting it just right was very important to us and that meant getting the LED diffusion perfect.

We are very happy to announce our latest kit, the PrismaChron! The PrismaChron Clock is our take on time as color. The display consists of three RGB LEDs, one each for seconds, minutes and hours. As each value progresses through time, its LED slowly fades through the spectrum from red to violet, and everywhere in between. Just like the Binary Epoch Clock, the PrismaChron is fully Arduino compatible, open source, and ready to be hacked.

Just got a nice review from the great David L. Jones over at EEVBlog in Mail Bag episode #546 Jump to around minute 6 for our kit.

Just a small update to the site, but hopefully one that will be useful. We have added the ability to easily print and download (PDF format) our product guides. Look for this icon at the top right on the Guides pages for our various products: Click hear on the Guide pages to customize and print (or save to PDF)