Maniacal Labs

CC_Teaser Good news everyone! In just a few days, on Monday, November 11th, we’ll be launching a new kit! We’re going to be doing things a little differently this time and will be launching it as a pre-sale over on Tindie.

Realizing that Halloween was only a few days away, I thought to myself “Self, your house has no Halloween decorations, and thus, is Lame.” Being the crafty (and cheap) electrical engineer that I am, I took stock of my…stock…of electronic widgets and bits. After some thought, I decided on a couple of beady little red eyes peeking out of various windows would be appropriately festive, somewhat creepy, and very easy to through together.

Last month, Dan and I went to the Open Source All the Things event in the Research Triangle Park and had the pleasure of meeting Jason Hibbets of both Red Hat Software and OpenSource.com. Jason gave us a lot of great advice but also asked to considering contributing to OpenSource.com - which we, of course, couldn’t turn down! So, if you’d like a little behind the scenes look at the beginnings of Maniacal Labs, head on over to OpenSource.

We would like to introduce a new product. Okay, not really a new product, but a completely different use for the Binary Epoch Clock Kit that we already sell. We’ve been hinting at it for a while now but we are proud to finally announce EpochPOV, a custom firmware that turns your Binary Epoch Clock into a fully functional Persistence of Vision - or POV for short - display with a 32 pixel resolution!

Last night I got to show off our Binary Epoch Clock kit on Adafruit’s excellent Show-And-Tell weekly Hangout. There was a great turnout with tons of cool projects and I’d like to thank Adafruit again for letting me join in. Check out the whole show. There were a ton of great projects (I’m at 2:26): Towards the end of my time, Limor Fried noted that the only thing it needs now is a 1D pong mode and I am rarely one to pass up such a challenge… So this morning I came up with this:

555KitTestCircuit A few days ago, I saw this kit from Evil Mad Scientist (by way of Adafruit). My first reaction was more or less �… That�s brilliant!� I love projects that have a healthy dose of wackiness as part of the recipe.

Friend of Maniacal Labs, Josh, is a huge Ghostbusters fan. How much, you ask? This much: Ecto Mini Why yes, that is a Mini Cooper Ecto-1. A couple weeks ago, Josh emailed me asking if it was possible to get en Epoch Clock Kit with blue LEDs.

John over at tronixstuff.com has a review of our Epoch Clock kit. He offers a great walk-through of the un-boxing and building experiences, complete with pictures. He also offers a great explanation of Unix time. A big thanks to John for his consideration of our product! And, of course, we’re glad he liked it! (tronixstuff.com is based in Melbourne, Australia and was started in 2010 by John Boxall. The site features electronics kit reviews, Arduino tutorials, and other assorted projects.

Do you live in the Raleigh/Durham area? Are you a fan of the Open Source movement? You’re in luck! Check out RTP 180: Open Source All The Things on September 17th (for free!). The event features guest speakers from three schools you might have heard (NC State, Duke, and UNC), as well as local members of the Open Source community. In addition to basing our operation on the tenants of Open Source, we here at Maniacal Labs enjoy supporting local people and organizations who champion the cause.

Probably the hardest part of assembling our Binary Epoch Clock Kit is keeping the LEDs aligned and all pointing the same direction. So we designed this simple tool to help out with that process. Not only does it help keep all of the LEDs aligned, but it makes soldering them in much, much quicker. Normally, per our instructions, you would solder the LEDs in four at a time. But with this, simply insert all of the LEDs and then fit the jig onto the front of the clock PCB.