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thingm is just about to release BlinkM! -
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.thingm :: an electronic product studio: BlinkM - Link.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.
Neat idea. A little too close to something I'll be posting soon, but they have a unique angle with the preprogrammed sequence ability.
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Nifty for sure...i certainly hope it isn't $15 for one of these LEDs...thats rediculous.
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mrblack51: Well, I just bought 500 of those exact LEDs for $200, and an 8 pin microcontroller is under $2 in quantity one. Throw in PCB cost for under 1 square inch, and I'd estimate that in production quantity they'd have a hard time inflating the per-module cost to over $3. However they do have nice software, and a lot of people are willing to pay for convenience.
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lower the price to sub-$10, and watch the sales fly.
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Sure this is a neat idea...a NC corp invented it in 2002 for decorative lighting though so its not all a ThingM owned idea. I am sure this was not intentional infringement, however , so no harm no foul.
Reference US 7015825 , 7327337
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