Federico Lucifredi wrote: > I am playing with the Blink(1), an USB-connected RGB LED that > kickstarter seeded a few months ago: > http://thingm.com/products/blink-1.html
Nice. It's trivially simple (in terms of outward functionality), and yet I can imagine several uses for it. It's one of the few Kickstarter projects I've seen that struck me as practical and useful. > Also, the ability to create color animations or blinking patterns > makes it even more flexible than a plain "Red Alert" signal. Sure, but is it worth $30? Probably not. At least not for most typical applications. If it is successful, no doubt there will be a Chinese knock-off for $5 that just uses a simple single-color LED, instead of an RGB LED with the ability to do fancy color fades. Unfortunate for the developers, as they deserve to get the sales themselves, but you have to match your price point to your application. I think at a $5 to $10 price point they'd sell in excess of 3 to 6 times what they'll sell at $30. Some of their other products seem more worthy of the price points. For example, they seem to be heading in the direction of offering tiny battery powered RGB LEDs which can be remotely controlled via IR. (They sort of have the pieces to do this, but currently you have to plug together several separate products.) With that product I can see someone using it for decorations and theatrical set pieces where the color and blink pattern control would be important. > Quite nice if you want a rack of machines to signal you something, > and they don't have a built in light for this purpose. Yes. Assuming your server has a USB port mounted somewhere that you'll be able to see it. Though I suppose a short USB pigtail cable will remedy that if you don't. The USB parallel port adapter, which I wrote about previously, I traded for a USB serial adapter, which is no longer needed for the intended project (found a better solution), so I was actually thinking of repurposing it as a Blink(1) equivalent. It will be far simpler. Likely just a single one-color LED. I wonder why they chose the HID USB profile, rather than serial? Vendors of oddball stuff often seem to use HID and say they do because it is more universally supported and doesn't require drivers, but isn't that also true for serial? (For example, the first generation of Zwave USB interfaces used serial, and I think all of the current generation use HID.) -Tom _______________________________________________ Hardwarehacking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/hardwarehacking
