Maniacal Labs

MSP430NixeTubeClock-11 I saw this kit come up in Tindie’s twitter feed, and instantly knew that I wanted one. It’s relatively inexpensive, not very complex, and it looks amazing (especially with the acrylic front and back plates).

First AllPixel Boards Look what just showed up in our inbox from Seeed Studio! Yup… Production AllPixel boards! :) A handful of these are on their way to Maniacal Labs headquarters, where they will be checked over to confirm they meet our standards and then we will give Seeed the go-ahead to finish producing the rest of the boards.

ESP8266 You’ve probably heard about this little module by now; a cheap, wifi-enabled bit of wizardry that is all the rage. Using serial communication, you can talk to the device and send commands out to the interwebs.

We previously released a new BiblioPixel driver that supports the Adafruit Matrix Hat and the performance was not great. That’s all changed with the Raspberry Pi 2!

Since the Raspberry Pi 2 was such an InstaBuy™, we of course bought a couple immediately and they showed up this weekend! So of course, the first thing to test out was how much of a speed improvement we could get with BiblioPixel and the AllPixel. Especially with the new multi-driver support :) The tests were broken down into 3 stages; Easy animation with increasing pixel count, Hard animation with increasing pixel count, and constant pixel count with increasing driver count.

Previously, I talked about the ODROID-C1 as a possible, faster alternative to the Raspberry Pi. Well, there’s a reason I haven’t mentioned it again… the software is a mess. It just doesn’t have the community around it that the Pi does. Most disappointing was that their USB Serial kernel driver was a total mess and would not work with the AllPixel :( So, that’s why I’m so excited about the new Raspberry Pi 2!

Time for everyone’s favorite segment… err, never done this one before. And it’s something we ordered… but for other people, so we’ll say it counts. For the awesome folks at TriEmbed, our local electronics enthusiast group, we decided to put together a bulk order of LEDs with the manufacturer we are using for the AllPixel Kickstarter rewards. It’s not everyday you get $2000 worth (more like $5000 street value) of LEDs in the mail, so it seemed best to document the unboxing.

So, last week, Adafruit launched this little beauty. Having just acquired a handful of Pi B+ and A+ boards and already having a 32x32 matrix that I’d been meaning to use, this was a complete insta-buy™. And, of course, I had to make it work with BiblioPixel! Well, it showed up last night and the coding commenced! Fortunately, Adafruit already had a library ready to go with a handy python wrapper, since the main code is all C.

Last time on the Maniacal Labs Blog… we told you about the awesome new multiple driver support added to BiblioPixel in the latest version. Well, check out the video below to see the proof! All the code from the video is below. More details are on the BiblioPixel Wiki. And be sure to visit the Maniacal Labs Forum to discuss usage or ask questions. Happy making! #Load driver for your hardware, visualizer just for example import time import bibliopixel.

It’s been a little over a month since the Kickstarter for our AllPixel finished and things are progressing nicely. We’ve certainly learned a lot about communicating with an overseas manufacturer and designing a product for mass production. Nothing a few tiny tweaks couldn’t fix. Our goal has always been to deliver the best possible product. The final boards should be going into production within the next week or two! During the campaign, we set a stretch goal of providing multiple driver support to BiblioPixel.