Arthur here, hello!
My favourite news from the fortnight is that our My Baby's Got LED board has been certified as Open Hardware by the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA). We even open-sourced the application process on github so you can see what the certification involves, featuring some exciting licensing chat. It feels close to a self-certification, but the OSHWA sense-check everything before approving the product/project. Here's the product's page on the OSHWA site.
On the Friday before last I spent some time down a rabbit hole of combining an Android app called Tasker with WLED running on one of those newly certified My Baby's Got LED boards, culminating in a brief (& silly) video demonstrating the "I'm in a work call" functionality that might be handy for those in a home office situation. In practice you would presumably want something like a strip of lights around the edge of the door to the office, rather than a massive illuminated Liver bird:
Rough prototype for a home-office "I'm on the phone" light concept 🛑 in the hope it prevents people barging in to discuss the washing up.
— MCQN Ltd (@MCQN_Ltd) May 14, 2021
We promise the quality of the My Baby's Got LED board is better than the quality of Arthur's 'acting' 🏆#ibal223 #wfh #workingfromhome pic.twitter.com/gCLqjtFd09
Our plan is to sell these boards, not just play around with them, so I have been going over the Tindie page and documentation, to emphasise how easy it is to get set up using the board. I imagine people have been getting a bit scared off by the techy-looking PCB, while it's actually for anyone who can plug in a couple of cables and connect to WiFi. Super simple - while enabling more complex projects when you have the time to tinker.
I've yet to roll out any changes but here's a draft of something I'm working on - an attempt at fitting a functional 'getting started' guide into a thumbnail-sized image. Feedback welcome:
Teleprinter progress continues in part 7 of the vlog. The team are waiting for parts to arrive for the power supply, so turned their attention to the wiring for the signalling, trying a loopback circuit to get the signal from the keyboard sent to the receiver half. Here's the wiry details: