Hey, we (WyoLum) want to develop a kick ass FastSPI_LED driver board to run TiM. What is on your wish list?
Hey Justin - just so you know, Dan and I were talking about this again today: what our “ideal” MCU board would be. The thing that we came back to today was the convoluted ways that most of the ARM-based ‘arduino’ boards seem to hobble themselves with bad IO configuration, etc; you want to be able to blast out a ton of bits with the fewest number of discrete operations, but often the MCU/board configuration gets in its own way. E.g., the Spark Core, which is based on an STM32 ARM chip apparently only lets you do eight lines of I/O from each I/O register, despite the fact that the I/O registers are 32 bits wide. (I may be mangling the details, for which I apologize; Dan is still the IO guru.)
Other than wanting to avoid bad IO configurations, I think the next thing we’d look for in an “ideal” MCU board for FastLED would be great support for a variety of power paths: 5V in via USB, 5V in from Vin, 12V in from Vin (with 5V out), 5V MCU board driving 12V LED pixels, etc. Basically the three elements of any LED setup are: Pixels, Program, and Power. And once you have Pixels and Program, the remaining headache is Power.
Anyway, I just wanted to pass along the note that Dan and I often come back to the question of “what would our ideal MCU board be like?” Often, the answer is “well, it depends if it’s for a battery-powered wearable/portable, or a desktop project, or a wall-size project, or a Burning Man size project…” But focusing on a TiM driver might be an interesting way to narrow down the conversation a bit.
We have a Hackathon (at work) this weekend and into next week, with an “LED Jam Night” on Friday, so I’m sure there will be further discussion, and I’ll pass it along!
Thanks @Mark_Kriegsman ! In the mean time we build a 328 based TiM controller. Will not be super fast, but will work for the clock application we have in mind.
We’d love to work with you and Dan to develop the perfect ARM based board.
Oh, don’t get me wrong-- we have ideas for AVR boards, too-- of course!
You know what one of the most-useful things would be? Something that isolates power-to-the MCU from power-to-the-pixels in such a way that even if the LEDs try to draw a ton of current, a guaranteed minimum voltage is still supplied to the MCU. Otherwise: MCU boots, runs your (foolishly bright) animation, LEDs draw so much current that MCU goes into undervolt brownout and reboots, lather, rinse, repeat. Aside from the thing now being useless, you have no way to upload new code because the brownout hits before you can reflash the MCU. You’ve bricked your own creation.
Work-arounds include: put a 3-5s delay at the front of your sketch (not always desirable) ; use a larger power supply (not always possible, eg if USB powered) ; add separate a hardware switch for LED power (eh) ; have your sketch slowly ramp up brightness (eh) ; wait until FastLED includes global current-limiting 
, which is coming ; etc.
But basically, a way to guarantee that the LEDs power draw can’t brownout the MCU would be super useful.
Another wish: a simple way to pass unregulated, untouched power from incoming USB power rails to a pair of exposed pins. That way you can drive 2A of LEDs using an IPad charger and a USB cable… (Without frying the board’s poor little 0.5A regulator). Without ‘pins’ to access the raw USB power lines, you wind up having to solder power wires directly to exotic places in the middle of the board: http://imgur.com/PQeqFj3
Not that I would ever do that of course.
Anyway: let’s continue the conversation!
What interesting features / design choices are you looking at for the “TiMduino”?
TiNA (AKA TiMduino) hosts a 328, SD, battery backed real time clock, 7 channel spec analyzer chip, 5 buttons and a pezio buzzer, and is pin matched to TiM. @Anool_Mahidharia has driven 3 TiMs with it.
Hey now that sounds pretty good!
+1 for RTC!
+1 for spectrum analyzer!
Are they generally available yet?
(Cc @Daniel_Garcia )
…because Dan and I already have a couple of TiMs that haven’t been deployed yet, and this would probably nudge us over the edge
+Mark, they are not available yet. It truns out we used an obsolete part and the new(wrong) part got soldered in. @Kevin_Osborn had a few of the this part laying around. I’ll send you one if I can get the tiny part replaced.
Justin
You can power the LED separatly. Just connect the grounds between LED lighting and processor.
PS, you stink! Unbox those friggin TiMs!
Oh they’re unpacked all right! Tonight is the “LED jam” night at our winter hackathon and I have a couple handy… Wonder if @Kevin_Osborn is around tonight ?! 
Hey @Mark_Kriegsman
pray tell where?
At Veracode HQ in Burlington, MA (a couple of miles from Einstein’s Workshop). We’re having an LED jam tonight as part of our private/internal hackathon; I’d happily let you in as my guest if you were in the area. If not, we should meet up at EW some evening…