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Followed the same path as you. Of course the hardware is ridiculously expensive, as it happens when you spin your own stuff (needlessly). Will have look into rendering the patterns & streaming over sACN (a DMX-derived, seemingly standard protocol mentioned in another comment).
Which do you mean is expensive? The hardware costs around $5.
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Which do you mean is expensive? The hardware costs around $5.
The Pixelblaze guy wants 30$ for his ESP8266 board (I get mine for 2,7€/piece). A lot of that money probably doesn't go into the development of the software, but manufacturing and shipping. I just installed an Open Pixel Control [0] server [1] (receiver) on a Wemos D1 mini and can now stream pixel values to it using python [2]. This comes with all the downsides, of course, but does add a lot of flexibility. Pixelblaz…
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Author of Pixelblaze here :) FastLED is an awesome LED driver library with colorspace and fast math functions. I highly recommend it. Pixelblaze is that plus a web interface, compiler, IDE, and pattern library all over WiFi. You can reprogram your work remotely without cables, and all real-time, or even on a phone. I found that quickly iterating I could get a better intuitive sense of the changes I was making and get…
Thanks for this reply! I was curious too, since I just spent the last few weeks working with an esp8266 on FastLED. One type of shield/expansion I'd love to see for the Pixelblaze would be some sort of lipo charger and protection circuitry. My favorite esp8266 board has an integrated battery holder for an 18650, and I've found this to be my favorite way of powering all my projects!
Edit: matho. 25W, not 50W.
Great project! The hardware looks pretty simple, but the software side looks like a lot of work was put in, and it shows. Fantastic job.
Oh, I just noticed it's closed source. Too bad :/
Random question: has anyone seen a neopixel-compatible interface LED in a tinier package, like 2mm square? Would be great for some applications.
Reading the article reminded me that APA has been threatening vendors of the WS2812, claiming that it infringes one of their patents: https://hackaday.com/2018/07/31/are-patent-claims-coming-for...
Another disgusting example of patent abuse.
It surely looks to me as if they are using patents in their originally intended way. The downside is that they are hitting vendors with a C&D instead of going to the source. But that could rooted in the difficulties surrounding the ability of a taiwanese company to sue a china mainland one...
Curious if it can accept DMX in any form? (Though iirc DMX only goes to 16bit color)
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Yea, some combination of that for projection mapping, and perhaps sending directly out to Artnet/sACN for LEDs, servos and lasers? Still trying to piece it together as things get bigger and bigger. My contact information is in my profile. Can you reach out? I'd love to see some of the stuff you're doing and ask a question or two.
on jobs we use pixlite controllers for controlling lots of addressables and send it artnet out of touchdesigner. no need to involve madmapper as touchdesigner handles all the mapping you could possibly want without adding the latency of piping out to madmapper. if you're just doing hobby projects you can stream serial out of touch via USB to a teensy 3.2 and control (in my experience) around 4000 LEDs at ~60fps. for…
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Another disgusting example of patent abuse.
Funny how people always jump to conclusions when it comes down to people enforcing their patents. My understanding of this drama is, that APA is a small taiwanese startup that was actually the first company with a RGB LED with integrated driver. There are a bunch of chinese companies that are more or less copying their products and are pushing them on the market at much lower price and more agressive marketing. It su…
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Which do you mean is expensive? The hardware costs around $5.
The Pixelblaze guy wants 30$ for his ESP8266 board (I get mine for 2,7€/piece). A lot of that money probably doesn't go into the development of the software, but manufacturing and shipping. I just installed an Open Pixel Control [0] server [1] (receiver) on a Wemos D1 mini and can now stream pixel values to it using python [2]. This comes with all the downsides, of course, but does add a lot of flexibility. Pixelblaz…
Pixelblaze is a commercial venture for me, and I have to figure out how to make some $ from it to pay for my time so that I can keep making it better. I can't afford to spend the amount of time that I do on a hobby, and I don't have a sponsor.
If I figure out a way to open source it and have financial incentive to keep working on it, I'll do that. I've been carving out bits and pieces to open source that I think are useful utilities.
The hardware itself solves a few problems, such as level shifting, that I haven't see embedded on other esp8266 boards. It also provides a platform for more interesting hardware such as the (fully OSS+OSH) sensor expansion board.
On the pricing side of things, the hardware isn't a majority of the cost. OTOH I'm never going to compete with the $3 boards w/ free shipping. I don't have the volume where I can drop the per unit 'software overhead' to a level where I'm competitive with the low end Chinese markets.
The price of the product as a whole is very competitive in this market. There are cheap no-feature (completely closed) LED controllers for not much less, and high-end controllers start in the hundreds of dollars.
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If you want to replicate something like the language in Pixelblaze, it's not so bad. Its syntactically ES6, though without many of the dynamic features of JavaScript.
Michael Leibman (@michaelleibman) put together this codepen that emulates Pixelblaze compatibility here:
https://codepen.io/mleibman/pen/WMVbVq?editors=0010
You could use that as a starting point for some kind of RPi nodejs app that pushes pixel data to your ESPs, or perhaps port the functions (they aren't rocket science) to Python.
I toyed with the idea, but realized I have too many hobbies already :)