GOSHtastic - Game shows, Options, Software, & Hardware!

First, it's been a long time since I've been over here!  The LEDgoes Kickstarter has been keeping me quite busy, and I've been focusing most of my attention on that the past several weeks.  We raised our funding goal in about 9 hours, and currently stand at almost 800% funded.  However, it takes me at least a couple hours just to write these blog posts, and usually by the time I sit down on Thursdays to start writing them, I'd really rather be doing something else.  (I don't know how influencers balance their time doing vs. their time writing... maybe they have staff?) And just another brief aside: today, my samples from Texas Instruments arrived!  I ordered a CC3000 WiFi chip and several USB transceivers including the TUSB1105.  Clearly I thought it'd be fun to build my very own mobile device from the ground up. :-P  As much as these chips cost me nothing, they're also ridiculously small and hard to solder since they're in a QFN package -- tiny chi...

Well, this is big news!  LEDgoes, my modular scrolling LED matrix system, is finally being put on Kickstarter.   Check out the product here  and learn more!  (The Kickstarter isn't live yet because it's still awaiting approval; I'll post the link here when it's ready.) Why is this cool? Most LED matrices are fixed-width panels; ours is made from smaller panel modules you can push together to make your own desired size, up to 64 panels long. Because you snap the modules together, you can make a bendy LED display. This kit does 3 colors; most DIY kits can only show 1 color. It has an open, simplistic serial interface implemented in firmware, and very versatile software that can drive the firmware to scroll a message from various sources or even show animations.  The software could even help you break the 64-panel limit. The software can control a display consisting of multiple rows of panels in order to display bigger, taller letters.  In this case, ...