It’s not a game changer in the way that had been suggested before it’s release, as it’s not offering anything substantially different from the functionality already on offer from it’s precursors, to whom it undeniably owes an unacknowledged debt, and which can be created for a fraction of the price. In conclusion, the Pixelstick is a decent bit of kit. The ‘fire’ button which sends the selected bitmap to the LEDs is set apart, and is bright yellow, which is a small thing, but it helps a lot when you’re jumping about in the dark, as does the separate power switch, which is placed on the top edge of the box, where it’s easily accessible, but out of the way so you don’t hit it by accident when operating the device. with a bit of practise, they are big enough, and well spaced enough that you can feel where they are without needing to see them. Another aspect of the interface that shows the designers were thinking of functionality is that the buttons are extruded from the control box enough to allow operation in the dark, i.e. There’s an option for a timer delay, so the LEDs will wait for the prescribed number of seconds before lighting up, all of which increase the creative potential of the device. It allows you to alter the speed, brightness of the bitmap with ease, there’s an option to repeat the bitmap up to 99 times, or even reverse the left-right direction by which the bitmap is displayed. It allows to user to easily select from the bitmaps loaded onto the SD card, and has a number of other features that indicate the designers did some serious thinking about what light painters would want to do with the device. The Pixelstick interface is intuitive, being simple to use yet also comprehensive. The central bracket also has a fitting to insert a small length of metal rod which serves as a handle, and a surrounding section of tube allows the stick to be spun around the handle should the user so desire. The control box and the battery holder are both attached to the back of the aluminium backbone by adjustable screw fittings, so they can be positioned anywhere along the length of the device. The LED strip is in two sections, and they fit together snugly, with an adjustable bracket holding the two sections of supporting aluminium securely together. The LED strips are good and bright, being able to shine through ambient light well enough to allow it to be used under moderate streetlighting. Nothing rattles about, the LCD screen displaying the user interface is just about the right size to combine ease of use without being so big it gets in the way.
The cables are well sheathed and have durable connections to the LED strips and the control box. They have used extruded aluminum for the backbone and decent quality plastic to form the control box housing the circuitry. Bitbanger seemed quite determined that they would produce a robust piece of kit.
But this still requires the user to self-build, and this puts a lot of people off.Īnother major consideration that formed a large part of the pre-release update emails for the Kickstarter is the build quality. Subsequently, other versions of the concept were tried, such as the LightScythe by ‘Mechatronics Guy’ in Australia, and more recently electronics component suppliers Adafruit have published online tutorials on using the latest versions of addressable LED strips with Arduino and Raspberry Pi platforms.
The amount of technical effort made doing this quite a headache, and despite Mike’s excellent online tutorial describing how to build what he dubbed the ‘Digital Light Wand’ many people who were keen to try it, were put off by the headache inducing complications of self-build.
( Mike’s first example of this is here: )Īt the time, this required some tricky manipulation to generate the code to ‘paint’ a bitmap, and the hardware had to be self-assembled. The first such light painting tool appeared a few years ago and in January 2010, pioneering work by Mike Ross (TxPilot on Flickr) used the open source Arduino platform to send the instructions to the LEDs.