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CYZ_RGB alpha - blinkm alternative firmware

posted on 11 Aug 2008
The first release of CYZ_RGB, an alternative firmware for BlinkM, is now ready for download.

Go read the details.

BlinkM is a Smart LED produced by ThingM:
BlinkM is a “Smart LED”, a networkable and
programmable full-color RGB LED for hobbyists,
industrial designers, prototypers, and experimenters.
Just connect it to an I2C bus and start sending commands like "show rgb color" or "fade to hsv value" and so on and so forth (it does much more; see the human-readable data sheet).

A bit of explanation: I liked the idea to do a few more things with the leds and decided to modify the firmware. The original firmware is actually closed source (due to legal issues) so I had to start writing a new one from scratch. This first release is very basic but hopefully adding new features won't be that hard.

The new firmware has two interesting additional features in the works: the ability to act as a master on the I2C bus and support for dallas 1-wire protocol, to leave one pin free for your creativity.

Download

If you decide to download and give it a try, you'll find slave.hex and master.hex: the first is the actual blinkm firmware replacement, the other is the experimental master. You can flash the files on two different blinkms, connect them the to the same i2c bus and watch they change color together.

Browse the source code.

Download the binary release.

Get the sources with svn: svn checkout http://codalyze.googlecode.com/svn/cyz_rgb/trunk cyz_rgb

Interested? I need help.

I'd like to hear from you. If you have any patch to submit it will be welcome.

Please not that my experience in C is very limited. And it approaches zero when it comes to microcontroller programming. So, if you are any good at it, please be patient and expect the worse... i'm a java programmer ;). When you stop feeling sick after reading the code, well, drop me a line

Matteo
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