Maniacal Labs

We are proud to announce the crowd funding campaign for our joint project with our friends at WyoLum, the ULTiM8x8! ULTIM8x8 is an LED panel that does it all. From small wearable projects to huge displays, ULTiM8x8 has you covered. We’ve designed a super-bright, extendable LED panel system that you can assemble without soldering or special skills. ULTiM8x8 is a flexible, reconfigurable display that perfectly suits your changing needs.

Ultimate, Modular, No Solder, RGB LED Panel System. Coming Soon. Get pumped. crowdsupply.com/maniacal-labs-wyolum/ultim8x8 https://youtu.be/QYNyK__wYmM

Back when we launched the AllPixel, we also created a small device called the PowerTap that eases the task of splicing power at various points along a strip of LEDs. We sold many during the Kickstarter but they never really sold well after the fact. We’ve actually never made more after the original batch from the Kickstarter! As of last night we sold the last of that batch. It’s not really worth our time or money to produce more but, if you want some, have no fear… they are open source and you can still get your own!

Good News, Everyone! We’ve been toying around with the idea of updating the design for our AllPixel LED Controler for a while now, and we’re making great progress. The image above is our first prototype, fresh from MacroFab.

Hello! We’re not dead yet! Now that the holidays are behind us, we’re going to get back into the swing of posting more content on a regular basis. We’ve got some neat things coming up, so stay tuned. In the meantime, check out this Freaking Awesome arcade joystick built by forum user [mlapsa]. BiblioPixel was used to control the LED strips inside of the wood and Lexan case. Excellent work!

Earlier this year we were quite excited to receive an invitation from a friend to give a talk at the All Things Open conference, here in Raleigh. They had added a new track on Hardware/IoT and thought our experience might be a great fit. So, after a lot of writing, planning, and practice, we are pleased to present our talk: Open Hardware for Fun And Profit. Enjoy!

We called it Watney… you know. Potato. Read “The Martian” if you haven’t. Nothing serious here, just some summertime fun.

The ESP8266 Arduino package provides a great and familiar to use ecosystem for developing code on the chip. However, most examples for WiFi network connection and management involve building and uploading new code every time you want to change the network settings. That’s just more than should be required if you want to simply connect an existing and complete project to a new network. A forthcoming project in which we plan to use a large number of the Adafruit ESP8266 Feather boards for was going to be far to cumbersome to manage if we had to upload new code not only to change the WiFi network but to set static IPs.

AllPixel_1 Good news! We’ve decided to drop the price on the AllPixel LED Controller board to only $20! Never has it been so cheap and so easy to get your LEDs blinking in no time.

Git is awesome. It’s not just open source, but in the last few years, with the help of sites like GitHub, it has cemented itself as the source control software for open source. At Maniacal Labs we use it for everything and the same goes at my day job with Red Hat. At the latter, I’ve found myself having to use the “push –force” option a lot recently due to some oddities with the way our code review process works (that’s a much longer post for another time) and of course the joke about it being a “force push”, as in Star Wars, came up a lot.