Hello, once again! It's been a while since we've updated here on HAD.io, so I'd like to go over a few major notes.

The first of which is that Lixie has dropped in price, and is now $34.99!
(Available for purchase right now on Tindie)

A NEW WOOD, A NEW LOOK

As some of you may have noticed, Lixies are now built and sold with a 6.3mm black melamine-finished MDF, instead of the 5.2mm untreated birch they originally released with. This change happened for two reasons:

IMPORT REGULATIONS

Though I don't have all the details, my material supplier for the 5.2mm Birch had to stop carrying the material, due to a change in import regulation/legislation. I've heard from my guitar-loving dad that sometimes this happens due to deforestation issues. Yikes!

IT'S JUST A BETTER MATERIAL

Not only are the new black MDF parts easier to match a color scheme with, they're stronger too. Birch had some infrequent but irritating issues with splintering, especially when a shipping courier had roughed it up. I'm happy to report that since the switch to MDF in February, ZERO reports of splintered Lixie parts have come in!

A NEW LIBRARY

Though it isn't quite finished being documented, I have a new Arduino library for Lixie called "Edgelit". It uses a hardware timer to keep the displays updated, allowing for non-blocking animation techniques, and it utilizes what I call an LED "mask".

THE ANIMATION MASK

The Edgelit library has two layers of FastLED arrays. "FRONT", and "BACK". (Think of them as a foreground and background layer) Imagine this: you have a function that spits out a fiery orange LED animation on the "FRONT" layer, while keeping the "BACK" layer blank/black. The Edgelit library will create a "mask" that says which LEDs on your Lixies should be lit with either the FRONT or BACK pattern at any given time.

This way, you could have your Lixies do their usual job of displaying the time, date, share prices, etc., while that fiery animation plays out on the "on" segments.

PRESET THEMES

Because of the Lixie's popularity in representing the look of vintage numeric displays, Edgelit includes several preset functions to quickly mimic your favorite retro digits, now including Vacuum Fluorescent Displays:

void nixie(uint8_t argon_intensity = 3);
void vfd_green(uint8_t aura_intensity = 3);
void vfd_blue(uint8_t aura_intensity = 3);

ANIMATION CALLBACK

Since Edgelit features non-blocking functions for animation, you can attach a function to be called whenever Edgelit wants to update the displays. This can quickly be used to add something like a "hue += 1" line to make the Lixies constantly cycle the rainbow without having to make sure your main code loop does this on time.

NOT JUST FOR LIXIE

Edgelit was written to be expandable to other edge-lit displays like mine, such as the already-supported NixiePipe by John Whittington. If you want to build your own displays, or already sell a similar product, compatibility with any WS2812B-based display is super easy to include. Edgelit.cpp has an array of compatible models that you can add your product to like this: 

If LED1 on your board pertains to the numeral "3", and LED2 pertains to the numeral "9", and LED3 to "2", etc. then your array looks like this:
{3, 9, 2, 0, 1, 6, 5, 7, 4, 8, 3, 9, 2, 0, 1, 6, 5, 7, 4, 8,-1,-1} // Lixie 1 - there is space for a 22-LED display for things like decimals.

If LED1 on your board pertains to the numeral "3", and LED2 pertains to the numeral "9", and LED3 to "2", etc. then your array looks like this:
{3, 9, 2, 0, 1, 6, 5, 7, 4, 8, 3, 9, 2, 0, 1, 6, 5, 7, 4, 8,-1,-1} // Lixie 1 - there is space for a 22-LED display for things like decimals.

A WORLD OF LIXIES

In the last two years, Lixie has shipped to almost every corner of the world. If you plotted every Lixie set sold so far on the map, it looks like this:

That is an amazing achievement that I never imagined Lixie reaching. (It seems that our market is most concentrated in the US and Europe.)

Thank you again for your support, and more updates are coming this week!

In fact, my wife just became my first employee! More on that soon. ;)

LIXIE LABS STORE ON TINDIE