Thursday, June 11, 2009

Designing the Illuminato, Round 3

With two projects (the ButtonShield and the Illuminato, Round 2) now out the door, I figured it was time to get the ball rolling on a few others OSHW Bank projects. Justin S, Andrew, Jeff, and a few other folks have been working on shields of their own, and I've already gotten quite a few questions and suggestions about Illuminato, Round 3.
A USB-mini connection and standoff holes (thanks Robb!) are a couple thoughts that floated to the top. What do you think? Feel free to get a hold of me directly at jhuynh at gmail. I guess this is one makeshift way of doing collaborative, open source hardware design, without having to ship Gerber files back and forth :)
Then in about a week or so, I'll post up a revised list of features going into the next Illuminato here and over on the Illuminato page from the shop, based on what everyone seems to be looking for, and open up the OSHW Bank queue for Round 3!

4 comments:

Matt said...

what do i think? hmmmm... i think taht it should have a mini usb b port like everything else out there because the big b cables are harder to come by, and are a bit bulky when you try to stick them in your pocket,...

mholger said...

I'm still voting for mini usb-b too :)

Other ideas? How 'bout having the "bling" lights individually addressable? That's be really handy too... :)

Matt said...

ok... a couple of emails here:

dave wants more prog space, in general. i can't imagine what for, but if it's easy to, why not?

"hakr" asked about the backside led's - if there was some way to make more pwm pins

i think the big question in my mind is whether to keep the form factor the same, or maybe to increase it to the mega form factor. personally, i like the smaller size-of-a-deck-of-playing cards form factor...

Rich said...

Since most of us want to eventually switch AC power circuits anyway, why not add an SCR or two, on-board? The downside is the potential liability. No one (that I know of) ever died from making accidental contact with +5 VDC...

And how about an on-board matrix controller? Sure, that would up the cost/complexity, but imagine how cool it would be to drive an LCD phone matrix directly?

*sigh*

We can only hope, and dream ;)

-Rich