I’ve been using the Pixel Blaze for a ‘real long time’, having met Ben at (probably) Super Con a decade ago. I’ve bought I don’t even know how many from him over the years, and given away more than I’ve used. They’re a wonderful platform for people getting started with LED Art and programming in general.

Through my professional career as an exhibit fabricator I’ve put many, …many LED strips into projects. Something I’ve run into many times is wanting to treat individual sections of a strip as its own. The go to here is usually plonking if/else statements all around the render function but it’s messy, particularly when trying to move the pattern to different sections. I’ve wanted a mapper of some sort but hadn’t found time to figure out something I like. Until now, because I need to sub- divide a strip for a project!

This research deep dive was inspired from using my Dust Collector Remote. It works great, but after a year using it I’ve found the delay to connect pretty annoying. On bad days with a router misbehaving the 4 or 5 second delay while I’m waiting to turn a tool on can get frustrating.

This started getting me thinking about how it could be handled faster. I’ve used ESP-Now a handful of times and have appreciated it’s quick boot to ‘do something useful’ time. But in past projects, I’ve mostly used it as a raw socket and formatted my own messages. Wouldn’t it be nice to have MQTT infrastructure without the setup latency of WiFi or the complexity of BLE/GAP/GATT? I also spent some time dabbling with CoAP a bit this year and while it seems common to treat it more like HTTP, but when using features like Observe Resource it looks a lot more like MQTT or BLE Notifications.

Once you get to use a dust collector remote in someone else’s shop, your dust collector will not be the same. For me it was in a well maintained woodworking shop in a co-working space in Oakland, every time I was back in my shop at the museum I was irritated to not have it, frequently just leaving the dust collector whirring away contributing to my tinnitus and wasting power. Now that I have a decent workshop setup in my home it was something that had to be addressed, not just for the table saw and other tools but I wanted it to be able to be controlled by the CNC.

Going to have a small batch of unpopulated PCBs available in the new OiT Electronics shop.

Selling these will help with a final revision of this PCB that will correct some of the mistakes that made manufacturing and bring-up too difficult to make continuing worth while.

Get one now!

I found myself in a conversation about ESP32 boot times. Specifically the time it takes from boot until user code can do something useful with an IO.

As this was something relevant to Richmote but I didn’t have any actual data I decided to do a simple setup to measure the results. My test setup consisted of two probes one connected to the RST line and the other to a random GPIO. The firmware would immediately setup the GPIO as an output and pull it HIGH. Nothing else.