Tag Archives: peggy

Peggy Fail Whale!

FAIL WHALE PEGGY

Sean O’Steen of The Fail Whale Fan Club (failwhale.com) and part time tinkerer captured the essence of the Twitter Fail Whale on his Peggy. Check out how Sean planned his peggy here. Sweet! Thanks to Scott Beale / Laughing Squid for the photo.

See also: a Fail Whale Kinetic Sculpture and cameo appearance on Laugh-Out-Loud Cats.

(Peggy 1.0 kits are available from our web store or at the Maker Shed.)

“Peggy,” A Light Emitting Pegboard Display

Resist1- Wall hanging

With all the cool things that you can do with LEDs today, there is still one thing that’s lacking: simplicity. If you want to run a bunch of LEDs at a time, you usually end up spending a fair bit of time worrying about series and parallel combinations, matching brightness, and picking load resistors. Or, if you’re a beginner, maybe you only get one third of the way through the previous sentence– wondering if you’re already in over your head.

Suppose that you want to make a big LED display for your window or wall: maybe it’s your logo, a symbol, your favorite 8-bit character, or maybe even a sign that spells out words like “OPEN” or “ON AIR.” How do you go about it? The usual DIY solution involves drilling holes in a panel to fit your LEDs, then spending a heck of a lot of time wiring everything up– ending up with one resistor per LED (and a three-dimensional mess if you happen to look at the back side of the panel). And, if you do everything in the most obvious ways, it can even end up consuming a surprising amount of power.

While I have certainly spent my share of time constructing things with the aforementioned technique, at some point it becomes clear that there has to be a better way. In this day and age, shouldn’t LEDs be about as difficult to play with as, say, a Lite Bright? Today we are releasing a new open-source hardware and software design that takes some of the sting, complexity, and mess out of playing with LEDs. It’s a versatile and powerful light-emitting pegboard that lets you efficiently drive hundreds of LEDs in whatever configuration you like, without so much as calculating a single load resistor.
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