Interest Holocron Kit

SUPER interested in one of these for my wife. I'd be down for a kit + electronics.

Is the option for mild customization of the design still on the table?
 
SUPER interested in one of these for my wife. I'd be down for a kit + electronics.

Is the option for mild customization of the design still on the table?


Yeah; I'm all about options (the TOUGH part is getting al the parts to fit together. Changing out shapes is easy. Changing the etched pattern easier still).

Sneak peak of the pile of holo parts I'm assembling to make a small sampler... (proper pics once I've run off the missing parts, including a new idea for the Imperial Archive design...)

random_holos.JPG

The electronics is in an untidy state right now.

holocirc_02.jpg

Ignore the traces; that's an auto-route pass just as a sanity check to make sure I really can cram all those components into a 2" x 2" footprint. I hand-route my boards. (And I STILL haven't nailed down if I am going to use an external USB jack. Cutting up the end of my prototype right now to see how bad an Adafruit mini-B breakout board looks there)
 
Finally got a chance to laser out a couple of ideas I'd been trying out.

Lighting test with the new diffusor (a 2" cube of translucent acrylic set inside the holocron):

hypercube.JPG

The lighting is a lot more even now. I'm happy again. I've finished routing the revised circuit board (one that's small enough to slip inside) and that will go out to the fabber as soon as I clean up the silkscreen.

In the meantime I took one of my previous shell experiments and tried out a new idea with it: witness, the Imperial Archives Holocron --

imperial_01.JPG

Who says only Jedi get to have holocrons?

I'm reworking a couple of other samples from my experiments and scrap pile and will take some proper glamour photographs of everything when I get there. But I'm ready to start a run now. Even though I am emphasizing the kit (and will be doing that at close to cost) I will start with a couple fully-assembled ones to let me do the last tweaks to the kit files.

Here's what I will be offering:

Holocron kit; mix-and-match of at least three shell styles (Stolen, Imperial, and Temple), three diffusion styles (currently Counselor and Sentinel only), and at least two inner "circuitry" layers (currently Falcon only), in whatever colors are available at Tap Plastics (not a lot). The full Imperial Archives holo is a bit of an experiment as yet but has a specific matched set of inner pieces.

Lighting circuit: pre-programmed micro running 350 milliwatts of RGB (four neopixel elements), internal lithium polymer battery with automatic recharge when connected to a host via externally mounted micro-USB jack, co-hosting for user-supplied flash drive, capacitance sensor to react to a user's touch, and a tilt switch so you can turn it off without having to take the lid off. There are customization options in the software (and more when I get around to writing some "VCR" routines for the provisioned buttons).
 
I'm still in for a completed kit as well. Looking forward to seeing the customization options/ price point.
 
The new circuit board is at the fabber -- they're shipping in the last week of September. I'm going to hold off on glamor shots until I have it.

I'm still going to deprecate the fully assembled ones by pricing the kit at cost and marking up the fully assembled to make up some of the difference. Parts alone are costing me $35 on the shell and $25 on the lighting circuit...you can do the math.
 
I know this is extremely premature and likely something that has already been asked somewhere else, but I'm so impressed with how beautifully this has come out that I have to ask - have you given any thought to eventually doing a sith holocron?
 
The run is started. More-or-less; holidays have really cut into my building time, and we have some big projects due at work, too.

I discovered an error on the V. 1.1 PCB. I think I can rework them, but I want to order a fresh set of boards. But now that I've actually been putting them into fully assembled holocrons I'm starting to have some questions. So I want to put them before people here to see what is actually useful on the board and should stay, what is excess and should be omitted, and what would be really need and should be considered.

To wit:

1) Lithium Polymer battery? I think this is no-brainer; a rechargeable battery that will recharge off anything with a micro-USB connector; wall wart, computer, etc.

2) Neopixel or Cree? I have a rather nice little controller board for 1-watt "Cree" LEDs. This would be visually about 2x brighter -- but have a third of the battery life. The other drawback is 320 degree coverage; there would be a shadow on the bottom face of the holocron (the face that's usually sitting on the table).

3) USB hosting? Aka the ability to stick a thumb drive (if it is physically small enough) so it can be used as a USB storage device. Cute, but is it really getting used? Alternatively, I could put a micro-SD card slot inside the holocron; you can stick a 32 gig card for not much more than a thumb drive costs. It does up the complexity of the circuit board a bit, though.

4) Fully Arduino compatible? the boards I've been making are programmed via a standard 6-pin ICSP header. It would be a bit of a headache but I could switch over to USB-native or a V-USB stack that would allow programming via USB cable instead of needing an adaptor.

5) User option buttons. Is anyone really going to try to tweak the small number of variables? About all I can do is change the pulse rate, the brightness, and move the color center around. There are simply too many options for kinds of lighting animation to put them all in the code. Even making the button functionality described above is proving a chore to stuff into the chips I'm using.
 
While I'm not on the run... (I'll chime in!) :)


1.) yes (of course!) lol

2.) Myself I'd say neopixel or DotStars.. they are plenty bright in this small space.. and you can position/secure anywhere you want. (ie: no shadows)

3.) I guess I'm not really following the SD card path/option? Having a USB/thumb drive connected that maybe extends out from the 'cron to connect to the PC.. turns it into a storage piece.. (you might be able to write some sort of autoplay 'app' and make something else useful out of it)

4.) Myself.. (wouldnt matter) but I'm not sure if anyone else has Arduino experience. I'm also not sold that they should be changing things.

is the default code open source/posted? (or will it be?)
is the rest of the project open source? (pcb board and schematic files..etc?)


Its probably best left up to the developer on how you want to offer your end piece/work. (do you want to support questions when people try/fail to change the sketch?)

5.) not sure about the options.. maybe some interface/gui buttons to control some basic features as you mentioned..

alternately (as I have done in the past) you can store some parameters on a micro SD card and have the user edit things from there? (for major tweaks or things that are really button accessible)


What approach are you using now in the current version? (cree or neo's?)

Neos have very specific timing they need to work with.. this make doing other things a bit more difficult since the main chip is so busy keeping the neopixels updated..etc

* which is why I mention DotStars as well.. guess more or less thing as neopixels.. but not the strict timing issues.. (allowing for other code to execute easier)
 
I've built both Cree and Neo-based circuits. The current holo circuit -- which I'm shipping now -- uses four neo's pointing outwards in a ring. Gives pretty close to 360 spherical, with a small shadow cone where the board itself sits. The first one I did was a very compact PCB and I was able to mostly avoid the board shadow, but doing it this way vastly simplifies construction by me or by purchasers of the kit.

Thanks for reminding me of the option of putting a plain-text config file on an SD. The downside to USB hosting is thumb drives are relatively large. As set up now you need to pop the diffusor cube off the leds and stick it in a USB slot on the circuit board. The holocron itself just has a micro-USB socket -- for minimum visual distraction when operating in stand-alone mode.

Moving to microSD means you still have the option of hosting files on the holocron on user-supplied media, but the internal footprint is smaller -- AND the media is potentially visible to the Holocron as well. The downside is having to add a controller chip, crystal, and so forth for that, and the simplest to work with is still a 36-pin SMD package.

Really, though, the main problems with offering options are; a) there are too many possible variations, from steady color to color shift to candle flicker to shimmer. I've done a bunch of these in the past but I've only got 8K to work with on the current ATtiny (I'm contemplating upgrade to ATmega, but once again...36-something pin SMD and my SMD skills are still developing). Right now the standard animation loop contains half a dozen variables which get read out of EEPROM -- those are the user hooks, but I have barely 1K left to code the existing on-board buttons to let the end-user change them.

Thanks so much for thinking on this. Glad I'm not completely out of the ball park for the directions I've gone so far.
 
The run is started. More-or-less; holidays have really cut into my building time, and we have some big projects due at work, too.

I discovered an error on the V. 1.1 PCB. I think I can rework them, but I want to order a fresh set of boards. But now that I've actually been putting them into fully assembled holocrons I'm starting to have some questions. So I want to put them before people here to see what is actually useful on the board and should stay, what is excess and should be omitted, and what would be really need and should be considered.

To wit:

1) Lithium Polymer battery? I think this is no-brainer; a rechargeable battery that will recharge off anything with a micro-USB connector; wall wart, computer, etc.

2) Neopixel or Cree? I have a rather nice little controller board for 1-watt "Cree" LEDs. This would be visually about 2x brighter -- but have a third of the battery life. The other drawback is 320 degree coverage; there would be a shadow on the bottom face of the holocron (the face that's usually sitting on the table).

3) USB hosting? Aka the ability to stick a thumb drive (if it is physically small enough) so it can be used as a USB storage device. Cute, but is it really getting used? Alternatively, I could put a micro-SD card slot inside the holocron; you can stick a 32 gig card for not much more than a thumb drive costs. It does up the complexity of the circuit board a bit, though.

4) Fully Arduino compatible? the boards I've been making are programmed via a standard 6-pin ICSP header. It would be a bit of a headache but I could switch over to USB-native or a V-USB stack that would allow programming via USB cable instead of needing an adaptor.

5) User option buttons. Is anyone really going to try to tweak the small number of variables? About all I can do is change the pulse rate, the brightness, and move the color center around. There are simply too many options for kinds of lighting animation to put them all in the code. Even making the button functionality described above is proving a chore to stuff into the chips I'm using.

1. I am no electronics expert, but I don't plan on having this light up for hours. I'll light it up for a minute or so to take a picture

2. Again I don't have a clue and going with your best advice. So for I have been over joyed with everything you have done

3. I wouldn't need USB hosting, I wouldn't do anything to change it. Once it's set up that's how it's going to stay with me

4. Again I wish I was better with electronics but I'm not, so I don't need the ability to change anything

5. No buttons for me, I'll do too much damage that way! Lol




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I've built both Cree and Neo-based circuits. The current holo circuit -- which I'm shipping .

I'm a little confused, I'm going to have to check tonight. Is there still a run list?


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