Hyperlights update...

awww I'm sorry to hear that mate

Good news that you have the boards though

can't wait to see what you've done btw, I might actually be able to afford a pair at last, though there's a uni order going through making a set of big contact crystals @near cost very, very tempting ...

tempt me back

o_O Will I be able to buy one, and get it send all over the world to sweden?

I'm really enjoying the progress of your hyperlight mate. Your doing a grand job!

Sorry to hear about your relative, I lost a realative close to me not to long ago.. It hurts, but I think most people can relate to that feeling, hope you will be able to pull through just fine!

Cheers for Hyperlights!

Thanks guys... 'tis appreciated.

I'll see what I can do about tempting you away from the dark (or should that be clear?) side Yakumo

I see no reason why shipping to Sweden would be a problem

the neutral side me thinks

so how much money do i owe you john?

where's the line? do i need to pull a ticket? get a number? should I camp out outside your house? what kind of bribes do you accept for early delivery?

I am so reserving money JUST for you for a pair of these!

poke

come on live up to the thread title, I'm not enjoying sitting on all my birthday money

btw, did you think about a variable resistor or something so the user can tune the brightness, to save eyes / battery life depending on the ambient light conditions?

wish i had birthday money to sit on, futons just dont do it for me anymore

Alright well a slight update is that we now have two boards running the new firmware which allows you to pass parameters to the sequences you can build up. It needs a bit of tidying up, but it does work

I'm working as hard as I can on these at the moment.. I'm being held up by the design of the balls, but my designer friend assures me she'll look at them in the next couple of days. Assuming there are no problems, we'll get a small test batch built and shipped to a few people. I need:

1 x complete geek
1 x complete technophobe
1 x something in the middle

I'd like at least one of those people to be a ladie too so I get a reasonably balanced view of what people like / don't like. Also, each of those people would have to have money.. and I can't see the prototypes being cheap (although they will be sold at cost price).

We're still a little way off getting the first prototypes, but once I have an idea of how many people would be interested (and have the money) for one of the first test pairs I can start to home in on a price (this would be purely for the prototypes).

How does that grab you?

My pitch will have to be that some would put me as the complete geek, but if not I definitely have PLENTY of ubergeeks around if I get stuck with anything (qualified RF/electronics test engineer, full time asm/c/u name it programmers), so I can easily be a middle geek

got vs2k5 installed if that's what your coding with, and bought a nice shiny new electronics soldering iron the other day when I had to gut my laptop and fix the PSU socket

the £££'s the interesting bit though, you'll have to let me know how it's going, but I'm fairly determined so I'll make it somehow, and I know what you were talking about roughly before.

I can get lots of opinions/additional testing from the 3 clubs I'm with weekly and I beleive I'm not tooooo far away geographically either

and finally, first post since you put that up!

you may know better suited people, but I had to try!

Good pitch with plenty of compelling reasons

Having access to lots of people (3 clubs) is definitely a bonus... What I want most from the trial is to make sure that I've not missed something obvious that doesn't bother me, but which most people really hate. It's very easy when you're developing something on your own to overlook what seems to others very obvious! That and I want to be sure that it's near impossible to break them

I spin Mondays with Ox Uni, Wed with the Cowley juggling club, Thurs with Brookes (and Beth, so they can get whip catch tested too )

As for breakage testing, I'm confident my ninja head will defeat all poi, having conquered Hyperlight mark3's already, and fended off some Aerotechs. I don't want to encourage anyone to start actively trying to test that on me themselves though

A set of Hyperlights would finally give me some toys I'd really feel confident taking to any kind of club, and might finally actually get a buskers license for too.

I just want some. And I have money. Is that sooo wrong?

I could be the middle girl?

HAHA

Meg is begging for poi.

I never thought I'd see the day....

I'm going to beat you about the face with them.

and then attach them to my staff and start again.

gaylord.

To be fair, they do look pretty good attached to the end of a length of polycarbonate tubing

That certainly settles two categories. I just need someone who spins loads but looks at techy stuff and goes 'er... ?'

I'm intending on building 10 balls and keeping four of them so that's three pairs to sell to testers. But then depending on prices, I may make the initial batch larger if it looks like there are more people interested at the sort of prices I come up with. Watch this space!

ooh big words for someone who knows they can't be bashed because of their extreme fro hair protection device.

(I would just like to point out that even witout such a device, Meg is still harder than me, and I would always runaway if she challenged me ato a bashing contest.)

Do I still qualify as a beta user/ tester Jon?

Yup.. goes without saying

like he'd ever forget you Chutters

Yup.

One of the perks of being Jon's b... BEST friend...!

What what what!?!

Pics? where/ when/ how?

hey MCP just saw LAB 06 (there's your answer chutney)

getting that haircut must have taken some real guts, it looks good on you imo

I just got the last lot of prototypes back from Mags. Time to crack on with some more development work!

I've been thinking about having a crack at the PC based software. Meg (and anyone else interested in contributing to its development), what information would be most useful to get started? I was thinking I'd draw a very rough MSPaint picture of what I was thinking for the interfaceand write a list of the functions that we have available. With those in hand I'll set up a subversion server and upload a first hack at a framework we can build on. I'll use open source software IDEs so we can all start on the same page

That's one chunk of work to get on with and I also need a basic design for the website for you Sym. I'll see what I can do - watch this space

guts and or stupidity.

hyper'ight: IMHO: I think that just a small commandline / binary program that writes to the USB that can be given an argument to a text file to send to it is the most important part. You've said you already have one... So the second most important thing is some specification of what goes in the text file. What commands do what, weather loops and such are allowed, why maximum values are and how quickly things can fade and change and such like.

Any gui can sit on top of that and prod it when it has a finished text file, sending it down the usb to the hyperlight and making the user happy.

twas a reply to yakumo about my hair...

already posted a pic of a basic gui earlier, not that it was borrowed elsewhere or anything

mcp's right btw, get something simple, that can be used out asap, so testing can be done, usability doesn't matter at that stage it just has to work for testing.

all the fun stuff can happen later, and if you get your file spec right at the start it can stick all the way through anyway

Oooh.. gotcha (hair comment)

The pic you linked to appears to be broken (forbidden access). But I have a reasonable recollection of what it contained.

My only problem with documenting the bits that get sent to the poi as a standard is that it's still a work in progress. I can certainly write down what I have so far though