Maniacal Labs

Over two years ago, I bought this awesome display panel: 1484-02 It’s a 7.5” square, 32x32 resolution, 6mm LED spacing, panel that would normally be used for digital signage. Though it is a “dumb” display that requires CPU intensive multiplexing (it’s supposed to be driven by an FPGA or ASIC), with the right tools it can be way easier to use than building, ahem, other types of displays ;) I have covered this exact panel a few other times, but after a couple years of sitting in my LED storage it was time to finally make it something awesome.

Were I to classify my projects, they would fall into one of two categories: practical and … well let’s just say “creative.” This one is a good bit of the later with a splash of the former. I’ve been wanting to play with RFID tags, and one morning while pouring a cuppa, inspiration struck. The RFITea

First, we want to thank everyone who showed support for the LongPixel by pledging to our Kickstarter campaign. It’s always wonderful to see that our crazy ideas aren’t actually crazy and that other people like what they see and want to give it a shot. However, we’re sorry to say that we didn’t make it this time with the LongPixel. For those of you that were hoping to get one, we’re sorry that it won’t be happening right now.

53per Many thanks to all our awesome backers for helping us get this far! We’re not even half way through the campaign and already over 50% funding :) We can make it, but it certainly doesn’t hurt to have a little help.

As part of our process to bring the LongPixel to life, we want to make sure that our manufacturer has a way to quickly, easily, and effectively test each LongPixel that rolls off the assembly line. To that end, we’ve created this test module that will interface with the manufacturer’s test fixture: A simple button push runs through a test pattern which verifies that power, data input/output, and each color channel is functioning correctly.

We were recently invited discuss the LongPixel on the Crowdfunding Cast with Jonathan Nadeau. Check it out to hear more about the genesis of the LongPixel and its many uses. http://crowdfundingcast.tk/crowdfunding-cast-episode-284-longpixel/ Many thanks again to all our awesome backers. We’re ever so close to 50%, so please help spread the word!

The LongPixel was designed to make using analog LED strips super easy and, typically, that means RGB LEDs as they are the most common. But the beauty of the way in which the LongPixel drives these LED strips is that it really doesn’t matter what color the LEDs are. Sure, the 4 wire, 3 color RGB strips are the most convenient in most cases. But you could, for example, connect 3 single color, 2 wire, strips, of whatever color you desired.

First, many thanks to all of those who have supported the LongPixel Kickstarter campaign so far! We’ve gotten a lot of great responses to the product and having passed 1/3rd of our goal we remain confident that we can obtain full funding before the end. We wanted to also mention and clarify how the extras work this time around. We’ve partnered with BackerKit to provide the post-campaign handling of gathering our backer data and accepting orders for extra items.

During initial testing of the LongPixel we were brainstorming new ways of stress testing it, since it’s actually really hard to get a long enough run of 12V LED strips that draw near the 10A current limit of the board. This little project was an attempt to approach that limit and didn’t nearly get there, but it was certainly fun trying. 24 3W RGB LEDs were wired in 8 parallel sets of 3 LEDs in series along with some beefy power resistors to get the voltage on each series chain channel just right.

In 2014 we launched the AllPixel: an easy way to control various kinds of digital RGB LEDs. This time, we wanted something that would bring that same level of ease to analog RGB LEDs. Enter the LongPixel. The LongPixel is able to drive 12-24V Common Anode RGB LED analog strips (the kind that have +V, R, G, and B wires). By using the WS2801 LED driver chip, multiple LongPixels can be chained together and treated as a “strip” of digitally addressable super-LEDs.