Maniacal Labs

POVSaber

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Try as I might, writing about the things I make is just never as easy as making them. I must’ve started this post a dozen times already and then forgotten about it. Assuming I actually finish this time, I’m only be a year late writing about it 😕

Button Pixel = Bixel

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We’ve made all manner of LED displays over the years. Some simple, some complex, some tiny, some huge. But no other has been such a culmination of all the skills we’ve learned over the years. We call it the Bixel, for Button/Pixel.

New Website!

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Hard to believe it’s been over 5 years since we started Maniacal Labs and kicked it off with a somewhat cryptic post. It’s been a fun ride since then and it just seemed about time to clean house and rebuild the website.

We are pleased to announce availability of our latest kit, the Super 7 Seg display! The Super 7 Seg kit takes using a 7 Segment display to the extreme! It started as an exercise in “how many 7 segment displays can I drive with a single ATMega328p” and we are quite proud of the result.

It’s always a happy day when a project makes it from the “In Progress” bucket to the “Done” bucket. This one had been in the former for quite some time. But now that it’s complete, I thought it fitting to show it off and share some of the steps along the way. This project actually started a while back, around when we were working on our giant LED display, Colossus.

When it comes to LED related builds there’s one right of passage that we somehow let fall by the wayside… An Infinity Mirror. We have a ridiculously long backlog of things we’d like to build and very often they stay on the list until one day when an idea strikes or a perfect core component presents itself. In this case it was finding a good deal on 144 pixel/m APA102 LED strips that were initially intended for use with another project.

SPARKCon 2017 was a great success! Thanks to everyone who came out and saw our blinky things. If you missed it, fear not! We have a summary of our featured projects available, with links to more detailed project pages as they are available.

It would be an understatement that we here at Maniacal Labs loves all things LED. With our first major product we brought you the AllPixel, allowing super simple LED control from anything with a USB port and Python.

Friend of Maniacal Labs and contributor to BiblioPixel, Maksim, has created an awesome full RGB 7-segment display module based on the WS2812B (NeoPixel) LED. These awesome little modules simply snap together and provide full RGB control over each segment of each digit, allowing for some pretty awesome effects.

While we’d love for everyone who uses our code or hardware to send us an email and show off their projects, not everyone does. So we keep an eye on the internet for cool projects that use our products. Last night we were happy to find the project shown in the video above. The video description confirms they use BiblioPixel and we’re pretty sure they mentioned the AllPixel as well.