Maniacal Labs

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.

BiblioPixel supports a wide array of hardware through its driver system but one of the biggest annoyances was always having to actually have that hardware in order to test your code. That’s why, very early on, we added the visualizer to the library which worked well for small displays, but was never great with high pixel counts or fast framerates. For over two years we’ve wanted to replace it with something better but could never settle on something that would have high performance and run on every operating system that BiblioPixel already does.

It’s amazing to think that nearly 5 years ago, before Maniacal Labs even, I released RPi-LPD8806, which would eventually become BiblioPixel, our pure Python pixel animation framework. Back then it was only for the Raspberry Pi and only for LPD8806 LEDs… and I barely knew Python at the time!

The recent questioning of if Arduino was fully complying with open source standards reminded us of something… in all the excitement of releasing the new and improved AllPixelMini we forgot to release the new designs! Oops. Well, fear not as the KiCAD design files for the AllPixelMini are available for your viewing pleasure over on GitHub.

The new AllPixelMini has arrived and now in stock on Tindie! Get yours now! https://www.tindie.com/products/ManiacalLabs/allpixelmini-universal-led-controller/

For as long as I can remember I’ve had a strong fascination with renewable energy sources. Not just out of a sense of eco-responsibility (though I did watch a ton of Captain Planet as a child) but also because of the dichotomy between the advanced technology involved and simple elegance of wind, hydro, and solar power. So, my plan has always been to gain grid independence and carbon neutrality and, on March 29th of this year, I’ve finally taken the first step by having solar panels installed on my house.