Easier. Hahah yeah its called the Pixel Blaster (not yet in production). I think its because of the very finicky timing involved with neopixels.

I'm spending way too much time on this as its just his eyes but so much of who he is, is in the color of his eyes. I like to attach emotional responses to the eyes and color. The BlinkM was perfect for this.

I just went to Frys electronics and got a few regular RGB LEDs and I cant get them to exhibit the same brightness and smooth transistion with PWM as I get with a neopixel or the BlinkM.

I have a few Gemmas here to play with, But I"ll order the Flora Pro because they are so dang powerful in a small size. I'm going to start with the mobile example that PTP sent through earlier today.

Neo blaster is not in development. It works fine and has been completed for over a year. It's in queue for manufacturing - when there's room from revolution. See other thread regarding diy sales volume challenges. Off topic for this thread. I obviously support diy as much as I can on the forum directly to you all. It's manufacturing new items that is difficult to justify financially to those responsible for budgets.

However, you can see the neopixel blaster working on its manual page. Access manual pages in the learn section or by pressing the question mark on the control in ARC.

There will always have the need for hardware to control neopixel units. This is due to timing constraints - and why there are so many neopixel controllers. Or, the easiest is to simply use an arduino. Maybe a teensy or one of the super tine arduinos, if the CPU is fast enough for the timing.

Absolutely not bashing the blaster not being ready for consumer consumption. I’ve been sitting waiting since it announced about a year ago?!.. Patiently. But it is torture to see video of it working and see it implemented in ARC, and not know when or if it will be produced. For me, it better I not know it even excists! Lol! Can I get hypnotized?! you’ve never seen the pixel blaster.....

Maybe preorder DIY items, hire out someone to make the boards by hand in batches of 100. That way the wait time is shorter and no production overhead. Might be better than a kickstarter because let’s face it your DIY guys are here in this forum. That way you wouldn’t have to give Kickstarter a % of your profits. I wouldn’t mind paying a higher price to get items on the coming soon’ to help pay for manufacturing.

But back on topic I will use a ardurino comparable board for this and swap out when the pixel blaster becomes available

@DJ Just a thought, what if those LEDs were encased in EZBits so they are part of the Revolution extras and so educators could add them to robots easily. DIYers could just take them out of the EZBit case.

Everything I see in the 'Coming soon' section I believe could be used for the Revolution. Certainly would be difficult to disprove to the money people otherwise. Its DIY without the case and Revolution with the case.

The Arduino code I hacked together ages and updated not too long ago can address from 1 to 24 neopixel as is. You can use a serial interface to set individual pixels to RGB color values or use the preprogrammed patterns and color fades. The color fades may be useful to you. They do make a new addressable LED that is generally known as dot star which the ez-b should be able to control directly, it has both a clock line and a data line so it is not timing dependent. I have only seen them in strings or boards so far. Programming for dotstars would take a bit of work but should not require an Arduino.

I actually have a meter of Dot stars, but have no idea how to write code for them.

I may have a few questions for you as I progress. You mind if I bug you ?

Don't know how much I can help. I don't have any myself. I have just be reading up on them a little. As they are interesting for Persistence of Vision projects and I have always wanted to make a persistence of vision device.

Links for reference on the Dotstars are:

https://cdn-shop.adafruit.com/product-files/2343/APA102C.pdf

I ran across a blog that addressed programing them a little at:

https://cpldcpu.com/2014/11/30/understanding-the-apa102-superled/

There is an arduino library to use them available thru adafruit. Or an LED driver library called FASTLED. Just post here and I will reply with whatever help I can give.