A friend of mine was invited to a disney themed party. The girl hosting it required all her invitee’s wear a disney costume, however, it had to be self made. Naturally, he wanted to do something as ‘cool’ as possible, so he chose Tron. He then ran over in my direction and said, ‘hey Jason, you gotta help me with my tron costume, I want to hack up an off the shelf tron disk’.

Here is the original disk we used.Here is a link to a video demonstration (this is not me doing the review)

You can see it’s a pretty cheesy disk, it’s just a kids toy. There are plenty of mods online, but this will put most of those to shame.

Here is our final modification, it’s a video link, CLICK it!

It’s got two lithium ion batteries, a usb charger for the batteries, a boost convertor to run the led’s, magnets installed so he can wear it on his back, it uses 1.2Amps off 12V (because of the 20 LED segments), and the microcontroller is running a poor man’s scheduler to get pwm output on all those led segments. All the code has been posted, and a schematic have been shared which demonstrates how we hooked everything up.

There is nothing on the inside that was saved. We threw away all the wires, all the circuits, and my friend even had to dremel away the plastic walls on the inside so everything would fit. The only thing we used was the enclosure. I wasn’t at the party, but apparently he was a hit and they asked him to turn it off because it was blinding everyone. Assuming they were in a dimly lit bar and drunk.

It’s open source, head to my github repo and you can check out the firmware, a little commandline application for kicking the device into the bootloader, and a very rough schematic.

Here are some more pictures of the process and his final costume.

Original Guts:

LED strip we used.

Some of the lights that will be used on the actual suit.

The costume was made out of a scuba diving suit.

Coming together:

He didn’t want his face on the internet.

Final Costume:

I unfortunately don’t have any images of the disk progress, and I can’t open it right now. There is so much in there, it takes me about 45 minutes to get it closed.

I will be participating in the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sale extravaganza. For the entire weekend, from Black Friday to Cyber Monday, Flirc will be 35% off. The price will be 14.99 the entire weekend, and there will be a per person limit. Make sure to tell your friends, I’ll be doing this until supplies last. Happy Thanksgiving to everyone, and my wishes to you guys and your families. 

It’s probably easy to assume that there isn’t much going on with Flirc. The website doesn’t get updated much, I’ve fallen silent on the blogs, etc. Usually when this happens, I’m hard at work and don’t have a second for an update. Things are finally settling down. I mentioned I had a bug in my latest bootloader, I will publish the blog post detailing this. I’ve fixed that, and was hard at work for over two months re-writing a lot of code. Check out the git activity. Nearly every day I was pushing a substantially large amount of code to the main repo.

Please remember, I’m nearly doing everything alone. I have a couple friends that help but their support is minimal. I work full time, and am also a new father. Every second of free time I have goes to this company. I know all my work has been mostly behind the scenes, but things will start to be a bit more obvious soon.

Two new products coming out that are variants of flirc will make a splash in the markets they were created for.

I’ve certainly learned a lot since Flirc has been created. I couldn’t have dreamed of the scaling problems that I’ve had. It hasn’t all been on manufacturing and the physical product aspect. I’ve had that under control for quite a while now. It’s been on the software side. I didn’t imagine how the firmware and code base would grow. It started out as some firmware with a sister application. It’s grown to a massive amount of code with shared libraries between products, abstraction to take care of different versions, and a build system that would make any huge company jealous. Deploying packages is easy now that I’ve integrated a tool called bart.

It’s been fun, and I can’t wait to show off what I’m working on.

Release Notes

Forum

New Store

I’ll start out with the juicy stuff. If you head over to the main flirc website, the buy link has been replaced with ‘store‘. It’s no coincidence that flirc has been extremely popular in the raspberry pi community. So it only made sense to help customers by giving them the convenience of purchasing the raspberry pi and it’s accessories at flirc. However, if purchased together, there is a 4.00 savings off the order. That’s awesome!

New Support Site

I’ve also added a new support website. I’ve decided to go with zendesk which will be populated with as much information as possible to help solve common issues. If you had recently emailed me in the past, my response time was hit or miss. As Flirc has grown, so has my responsibilities. I do this on the side of a full time job, and I’m a new father. It’s getting extremely tough, so I’m redirecting support questions to a knowledge base which will most likely answer your question. If not, there are the forums, and then me. I’ve been pretty active on the forums, but I can’t keep up with the sheer volume of emails that hit my inbox. Nearly all of them are easily answered somewhere on the site. I’m just making them easier to find.

New Products

Okay, so the theme for today’s post is the raspberry pi. I’ve got some exciting stuff coming out for that, it’s going to make some waves. More updates soon.

New Bootloader

I finished a new bootloader that will be shipping on newly shipped devices, more details on why tomorrow.

I’m happy to announce that we have a new authorized distributor in Switzerland. The Pi-Shop is now carrying Flirc, along with a handful of other great Raspberry Pi accessories. Head over to these guys if you live in Switzerland. Purchase Page Here.

Happy Halloween, I’ve got tasty treats on their way.

The 555 timer is a staple in electronics. From hobbyists to evil mad scientists, it’s simplicity of internal components allows for a wide array of complex use cases that has all of us engineers using the device over and over again. Universities design courses around it because it demonstrates the amazing things you can do with the simple fundamentals of electronics.

Eric, my good friend, partner, and founder, teamed up with some folks at Evil Mad Scientists to design a board made of discrete components. Since the 555 timer is made of a simple logical blocks, it’s still hard for a student or hobbyist to figure out what’s going on inside those blocks. Here is a block diagram:

Their idea is wonderful. Expose the guts of the device, give the engineer access to the good stuff so they can probe every point in the circuit.

They had the clever idea of making the device look like a blown up version of the chip. Absolutely brilliant, and for those wanting to get into electronics, this would fit beautifully into any educational building block.

Major GUI Changes:

• mac is now a universal binary
• added a windows application icon
• added windows install/uninstall icons

Most of these changes are only with the GUI stability and support. There will be at least two more releases until the final version.

Adding universal binary support was a pain. I needed to compile QT libraries again with different architecture options.  A number of issues came up which involved a few patches. Then it was a matter of elegantly getting this into the build system.

Head over to the forums to grab it, you need to register: http://forum.flirc.tv/index.php?/topic/679-download-here/

Release Notes

Forums