Kickstarter October Update

 Backers, its been awhile since I have given a status update.  Things have been a bit crazy as I try and keeps things on track for our November fulfillment of a majority of the reward levels.  I have made progress on supplies, shipments, and getting everything in line for our big production run.  I have been posting alot of updates on Twitter at https://twitter.com/RGB_123 . This will be the best way to follow the latest happenings with the RGB-123 product line.  Updates will be a summary of these tweets, but hopefully with a little more detail.

With that said here is a quick summary on the status of things:

1. All Early Adopter rewards have shipped.  I was hoping some of the early adopters would be posting (online or to me via email) some of the matrices in action.  I’d really like to hear back from folks (sales@rgb-123.com) on how things are going.  I’d also like to turn cool projects with code examples into blog posts as well for all to see and share at theRGB-123 website.

2. 1×8 Matrices – 55% fulfilled.  I really underestimated the number of backers that were interested in the matrices.  Luckily though, all the matrices have been produced and I am working through all the little intricacies of getting everything organized, packed, and shipped. I should have all the 1x8s shipped early next week.

The Shipping Department

The Shipping Department

3. Big Production Run – PCBs are nearing completion by http://www.goldphoenixpcb.com/.  I have used this fabhouse in the past and have had great success.  I am really looking forward to the product arriving at WAI in the next week or so.  I am also shipping the 150K = $18K leds to WAI early next week as well.  With these in hand WAI will have nearly everything they need to begin production.

4. LED Control– I met last week at NYC Resistor with Trammell Hudson and Micah Scott to show off the hardware and software that each of us has been working on in regards to these WS2812B leds.  I think both Trammell and Micah were impressed with the modular and easy to use form factor of the RGB-123 format.

NYCR Door Logo

NYCR Pano of the Space

Trammell has focused on leveraging the Programmable Real Time Units (PRU) on theBeagle Bone Black to control up to 55 strips/matrices in parallel!  This is pretty amazing and more details can be found at Trammell’s github page.  There is a lot of linux programming involved to make this run effectively and I am interested in leveraging Trammell’s work to adapt this for use with the RGB-123 product line.  If you are good C/Linux programmer please drop me a line about commissioning some of your time to develop this a bit further.  Any code that would be developed would be forked and would be Open Source.

BBB and WS2812 leds

Micah, is taking slightly smaller scale approach and is developing both hardware and software that is derived from the Teensy 3.0.  Fadecandy is going to make it easy to take strings of up to eight strings of 64 leds and produce 16 bit color with dithering and gamma correction all on hardware.  Then through Processing the generation of cool and interactive visualizations can be achieved.  This hardware will be available soon and I am hoping to retail not only the control boards, but some custom matrices designed to work directly with the Fadecandy hardware and software.

Fadecandy and RGB-123 Matrix

During our time at NYC Resistor Trammell was able to adapt some of Micah’s work directly on the BBB.  A video of Micah’s Processing example running on the BBB can be seen in the video below.  I was blown away by not only the visualization by the speed at which these two fantastic programmers were able to collaborate and share their ideas and code.  It was truly fantastic to see Open Source Hardware and Software combine right in front of my eyes!