Maniacal Labs

IMG_0884_SM I had two options: One required me to spend money. The other cost me nothing and gave me an opportunity to make something useful. To make a short story longer, I have an “analog” slow cooker (just a dial on the front) and I wanted the ability to set the cooking time and temperature.

MainKSThumb The following is an account of our experience with bringing the AllPixel LED Controller to market through Kickstarter. We don’t pretend to be experts. This just a record of what we tried, what seemed to work for us, and why we think it worked.

NExuS Introduction I’ve had an NES (my wife’s actual childhood NES, in fact) sitting in my parts drawer, with the intent of ripping it apart, gutting it, and jamming in a Raspberry Pi to make an awesome emulation box since… well, ever since the Raspberry Pi came out.

We are pleased to announce that the AllPixel and PowerTap are now available for purchase on Tindie! Tindie Logo All orders through Tindie ship direct from Maniacal Labs HQ in North Carolina, USA. We will ship outside of the USA, but be sure to check out all of our other global distributors first to see if there’s one near you!

[landgrvi] has been posting in the Maniacal Labs forum about some awesome gazebo lighting he has been working on. He’s using the new LEDCircle class to run some really neat circular animations. Check out this awesome small scale prototype!

One of the major things we’ve been hard at work on lately is getting AllPixel kits a little closer to those who want them and either missed the Kickstarter or want more. So far, the AllPixel and PowerTap are available from these great distributors near (some of) you: Australia TronixLabs Little Bird Electronics Pakronics New Zealand NiceGear United Kingdom DigitalMeans For those outside of the above regions, fear not; you can always still order direct from Seeed and they will ship worldwide.

… sub-panel. Couldn’t resist the mild click-bait there :) As you can see in the video above; no, not a full-on jumbotron, but just a single 32x32 panel designed for digital billboards. I’ve had one sitting in my parts drawer for nearly a year… But yesterday, the awesome 1-Pixel PacMan post on HackADay gave me enough of a push to finally pull it out and get hacking.

PCBtoCase As the AllPixel Kickstarter neared an end, we wanted to make design files for a case available for anyone wanting to 3D print their own. However, neither of us are particularly well versed in 3D design, and the usual method of breaking out the calipers to laboriously measure all of the final board dimensions seemed silly when all the dimension and placement data was right there in KiCad.

Thousands of people have already downloaded BiblioPixel (for use with and without the AllPixel) and we’ve received a ton of awesome feedback. Over the last couple months, we’ve taken that feedback and worked in a bunch of bug fixes and some cool new features. Check out the details below, but if you want to jump right to it and get the latest version, you can do one of these two options:

About a week ago, Adafruit released this beauty: APA102Disk Needless to say, I bought one immediately. Hardware It’s a really interesting display that uses 255 APA102 (DotStar) LEDs in 10 concentric circles on a 240mm circular 1.