BlinkM-Smart LED now in the Maker Shed

Today we welcome the BlinkM programmable RGB LED into the Maker Shed!

Have you wanted an LED that can fade from deep red to bright purple? Flash like a police light? Turn on with the subtle fade of an incandescent bulb? Flicker like a candle? That’s BlinkM.

We’ve attached an ultra bright wide-angle RGB LED to a microcontroller. Using BlinkM Sequencer, our software that fuses a color picker with a drum machine, you program BlinkM to be any color, and blink and fade in virtually any pattern.

When you’ve programmed your BlinkM, you unplug it and pop it into your project. Apply 5 volts, and it does its thing, whether that’s glowing your favorite pinkish purple, or pulse like an old neon light. All for under $15.

Color coordinate indicators to your panel design, display sensor readings as light, create color shift sequences up to 2 minutes long – many potential applications come to mind. These little guys connect to Arduino with ease, the demo sketches alone are great entertainment. Oh, and they’re really bright! – BlinkM-Smart LED

4 Responses to BlinkM-Smart LED now in the Maker Shed

RocketGuy on June 4th, 2008 at 7:24 pm said:

I like the BlinkM and the other products as well, but I have to say I’m disappointed with thinkm’s choice in regards to closed-sourcing and restrictive copyright.

I was going to buy a couple and integrate it into a project of mine, but now I’m thinking that I’ll just have to see if I can do it on my own.

Happy blinking-
-RG

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Collin Cunningham on June 4th, 2008 at 9:06 pm said:

It seems the firmware is available upon request –
http://getsatisfaction.com/thingm/topics/request_for_copy_of_blinkm_firmware

And you can read more about the development on Todbot blog –
http://todbot.com/blog/2007/03/25/smart-led-prototypes/

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Tod E. Kurt on June 5th, 2008 at 1:55 am said:

Due to a licensing agreement with a company who owns the patent to I2C-controlled RGB LEDs, it’s untested waters if we can release the source code to BlinkM. Since BlinkM is for non-commercial use only, like most all development tools, it should be possible, but it’s not spelled out explicitly in our current license.

Every other aspect of BlinkM (the PCBlinkM communicator, the examples, the sequencer, etc.) are all open-source, and as Collin mentions above, my pre-BlinkM work is all open. Plus in that blog post, I reference other “smart/programmable LED” concepts that are also open.

Of course, the BlinkM board also works as a general ATtiny45 development board. You can always overwrite the BlinkM firmware with your own code. And then revert it back to stock BlinkM functionality by reprogramming it with the original firmware hex

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Collin Cunningham on June 6th, 2008 at 2:45 pm said:

Thanks for the info Tod – that helps clarify things a bunch!

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