Synoptic Labs

Recently I’ve been playing with something I think is somewhat of a holy grail in LED enthusiast circles: the addressable RGB LED strip.

Non-addressable RGB strip (meaning you can turn the whole strip a particular color but not any individual LED) is becoming easier to find in the market but a RGB strip where you can actually control each LED individually has only been the subject of geek fantasy. Every time I’ve done something public with common RGB strip, someone has come up to me and said “oh wow man, can you control those LED’s individually?”. No, sorry, with those strips you couldn’t — but with this strip you can!

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So part of the reason that I’ve been so slack with the postings this year has been because I’ve been collaborating on this project as well. We’ve been sorta pseudo-hush about it as we’ve been developing it but, now that we’ve shown it in its full glory at Maker Faire, the cat’s outta the bag.

They’re in! I’ve finally gotten back the first factory run of serial LED strips and they look awesome. 50 meters of LEDs on a string and I’m really quite happy with them. I’ve tested about half of the batch and so far haven’t run into any build-quality problems. They just seem to all work.

In particular I’ve been impressed with how flexible the strips have been and how resilient (so far) they’ve been in the face of bending. Most LED strips that are available on the market now are coated with a rubbery like clear flexible coating which protects them from the elements and gives them additional strength. The factory was able to apply such a coating but I opted out of it since my intended application was indoors-only and I didn’t want the additional bulk. Also having them uncoated lets me change the color of the LED’s later if I need to. Thus without the coating these strips are significantly more fragile than your typical LED strip and yet they’ve put up with all the punishment I’ve dished out to them so far.

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