Comments on Upward, not northward: In the works: RGB monome-esque kit

so, how did you solve the LED brightness/color-dep...

2008-02-22T05:01:00.000-05:00

so, how did you solve the LED brightness/color-depth problem you wrote about earlier?
/frank

limor, even without an included controller it woul...

2008-02-13T19:51:00.000-05:00

limor, even without an included controller it would 'do stuff out of the box' in the sense that it will most likely have directions on which pins to hook to an arduino, and sample arduino code.

plug your arduino in, copy the code to it, plug your board in ... and viola. turnkey in the sense no programming or circuit designing would be required.

limor,I appreciate your advice. Because of your su...

2008-02-13T14:37:00.000-05:00

limor,

I appreciate your advice. Because of your suggestions (and those of Brian from monome) I've amended my post to make it more clear: I'm not trying to produce an all-in-one kit. At least for now, I'm trying to produce a new board, and hoping to find a small group of other interested people willing to buy extra copies of what I design and build, to help defray my costs. Hopefully the new post makes that clearer.

I've looked around for cheaper LEDs with little luck. I've been in touch with the ledshoppe.com people, and the ones you link to are common anode, whereas my design needs common cathode. I'm open to other options, but I have yet to find anything where I'm confident of the quality. I can't buy direct from a lot of places due to the relatively small quantities (what is a large quantity to me is still quite small for an LED manufacturer).

Thanks for the advice, and I'll be sure to ask any questions I have in the ladyada forums!

so the biggest secrets i have learned about kits i...

2008-02-13T12:37:00.000-05:00

so the biggest secrets i have learned about kits is:
* make the kit complete
* make it do something when you build it

when i say complete i mean, you should offer a version that has -everything- so that when the box arrives you can make it do stuff (other than, say, really basic stuff like tools & batteries). its frustrated me to get a kit and then it turns out i have to go to radioshack and buy a 9V battery clip cause it doesnt come with one.

when i say do something, i mean you should have the software/firmware ready to make it interact with the existing monome software. if its not easy to load it onto the uC (say, because its not an arduino) then it should be preprogrammed. i bought an avr programmer kit and it turned out the microcontroller in the kit arrives blank. so i needed a programmer to make the programmer kit work.

but there are tons of things you can do to pare down costs. for example, instead of buying from a middleman and paying $1.50/led you can go direct with http://www.ledshoppe.com/Product/led/LE1011.htm
and only pay $0.60 (LEDs aren't manufactured in the US so basically any US sellers are just buying from China/Taiwan/Brazil, etc and reselling)
if you post to the ladyada forums i can probably help you in detail. but a lot of it is deciding what you want to do with the kit and how many you are interested in selling.