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Arduino-Based, High Powered LED Lighting Over Wi-Fi
Gibbs-Duhem writes "This awesome video was produced by some MIT engineers recently. They've started a fully open-source, open-hardware high power LED lighting project that they designed to be modular enough to control with the Arduino (or any other control system). Using their open-source firmware, you can set up the Arduino to connect to Wi-Fi and receive Open Sound Control packets. Then, they went further and released open-source software for PureData and Python to do music analysis and make the lights flash brilliantly in time with the music! A full Instructable was also posted in addition to the existing documentation for design and assembly on their website."
LED Zeppelin
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
You program Arduinos in C++. The IDE thing that comes with it basically wraps some boilerplate around your code, runs it through avr-gcc and uploads it with avrdude.
There's nothing to stop you writing something from scratch to run on an Arduino board, and even pulling in some of the useful libraries that people have created for it. I actually prefer to write my code in gedit and use a fairly normal Makefile to make and upload the code.
Dear Speare,
As the person who designed the device and the case, I have to question your ability to do a valid cost analysis, but if you'd be interested in helping out with bringing the cost down we'd love to have you. You can join our hardware mailing list at http://saikoled.com/mailinglists/ Wramsdel is completely correct, I have to pay the initial software developers who spent hundreds of hours developing the base system so that it was in a usable state, and I think it's not terribly fair to argue that the thousand plus hours I put into design, prototyping, assembly, and programming is not valuable. This is a one-man shop, and it's taken me three years to get from my original light fixture covered on slashdot in 2008 (http://led-artwork.com) to this one, and I can assure you that the time investment is well worth it in quality. These things are good enough to compete with CK light fixtures (although I still need to finish my DMX -> OSC converter, I'm kind of totally out of money at the moment though).
Most of the cost issue is that in small quantities *any* machining is expensive. Just having the 8 holes drilled and tapped into the aluminum piping was $17, for instance. If I was casting 1000 cases, and hiring FoxConn employees to assemble them, and not paying the software or hardware developers anything for their time, sure maybe the price could get down to $300, but $150 is crazy. The raw parts for the wifi module are $60 alone, not including any case whatsoever, nor the included arduino, nor the power supply, and so on.
Also, Wramsdel is completely correct that I have to license patents from CK/Philips to sell these, and although the agreement is confidential, the amount is not trivial (and took lawyer time and my time to make happen). Additionally, I am trying to sell these to clubs as well so that I can offer cheaper versions to hobbyists (see below for how to get them cheaper). They are comparable to CK fixtures of similar price and brightness, are easier to install and use, and have free software to make them actually do things, as opposed to spending another $3k on control hardware and software.
In any case, my goal with this is to get the price down to the point where I would happily buy lots of them. Since I'm poor, the only way I can do that is to get orders for enough of them that I can drop the price. Suggesting, however, that the price should be the cost of the components alone is unreasonable for any sane business. I want to be able to do this for a living and as a community service, not as a community service alone.
In any case, since I want to get this off the ground so I can drop the price, I will point out a few things that you can do to drop the price.