Thursday, February 23, 2012

New Batch of PCBS ordered!

Theres finally been some success coming from this desktop!  After the first phase of the LED cube was up and running (not fantastically, but it did the trick).

(Phase 1 Exit video, I need a better camera holy crap)

Anyway the next cube phase is going to be pretty neat. I've gone ahead and ordered 10 prototype PCBs which incorporate all of the prototype boards that I made to get this thing running.  This means it hopefully will be possible to give away a LED cube kit that is just a soldering kit.   I'd like to eventually do just that.  Selling something I made is a ways down the road. I want to make sure everything is good first. 

The more interesting part is that  I've ordered another set of 10 prototype PCBs for my Modular LED cube system. This one's different from the 5x5x5 one because it's powerable up to 64x64x64 LEDs (2^18= 262 111) Which is a hell of a lot of LEDs. The computer power supply being used for it is absolute overkill, but I wanted to try and use that as well.  I think as a possible future "improvement" I might make a power supply board (or source a +5V power supply).

The last PCB Ill hopefully be getting is a Kill-A-Watt V2 PCB. It's the same basic functionality as the kill-a-watt already, with the major exception that you can plug it into your computer over USB and monitor real time power requirements.  What makes this interface even better is that if you use a pair of Xbee's it could even be possible to get data wirelessly!  All of that would be wayyyy down the road from now; but its something that could potentially be done. 

I guess we will have to wait and see what shows up in a few weeks!