Blinking lights and bumble boards
One of the things I’ve been thinking about lately is putting RGB leds under proper monome keypads. Projects like the Tinct Project do a nice job of proof-of-concept style design, but the SparkFun buttons they use are pretty huge, and they have a slightly different feel than the proper monome buttons.
So I found some 1210 RGB leds on Mouser and they fit nicely under the buttons, but tehn@monome mentioned they might not be bright enough to be useful. So, I designed an Arduino shield to test them out.
The camera doesn’t do the best job showing the colors tone, but rest assured, they look quite nice. So nice that it’s actually tempting to turn my grayscale 128 into an rgb 128. I’m not yet sure if I’ll go to that extreme, but it’s a serious consideration at this point.
I also received the Bumble-B prototype PCBs from the fine folks of Dorkbot PDX this weekend. I’ve yet to populate any of them, but that project is coming along nicely, albeit a bit slowly. Here are some pics of the board!
Thanks for linking to this on the leaflabs project wiki! The boards look great (love the purple). Can’t wait to see one populated and working. Very cool concept.
That… was actually someone else… =) Adam or gbulmer maybe?
I’m glad it’s up there though. Thanks for stopping by!
Edit – Ok, I edited the wiki a little bit to give some more details.
Can’t wait to get my hand on this board
It would be great for GPS logging / navigation that I would like to use Maple or variant for. I do see that the back row of I/O pins that exist on the Maple does not make an appearance here. Do you not plan to support the additional I/O pins? If it’s a question of board space, why not take the approach of the LiquidWare Illuminato and double-up the Arduino pins (side-by-side configuration)?
i wasn’t aware of LiquidWare, so thanks for that reference.
the microSD uses 6 GPIOs cause it’s wired to use the SDIO hardware on the stm32, and the wifi chip uses a few as well. these two peripherals are hardwired by design.. if you need the extra gpio and want more flexibility, there’s always the maple proper =)
there are still about 8 gpio’s unused, but i felt that adding another header would complicate things too much.. basically, it’d be too much of a pain to route without making the board bigger, and then we’d lose the arduino footprint…