If you missed the Kickstarter project but want to pre-order some Digisparks - you can do so at our website: http://digistump.com - click the "Pre-order Form" link. Pre-orders will ship as soon as all Kickstarter orders have shipped.
If you need to change your address you can do so with the Order Status link that was sent to you in the "ACTION REQUIRED" email. If you cannot find this link please send us an email (support at digistump dot com) or kickstarter message, be sure to include your email address to help us find your order - and we will send you your order status link.
Updates
We don't have a whole lot of news, because things are moving along as planned and we're waiting for the final confirmed ship dates from the factory. The time frame we gave in the last update (which you can see here) is still looking good (starting to ship late Nov to early Dec), we are realistically looking at shipping starting more likely in early December then late November at this point, but are continuing to work with the factory to expedite things further.
We have nearly all of the final production PCBs for the shields in hand (and all parts for the kits, shipping materials, etc in hand as well), we are just waiting on a few more batches of the PCBs in the next week or so. We are about 50% done with kitting all of the shield kits, that's over 10,000 kits complete and ready to go. All 6,000 RGB kits are ready to go (thanks to my wonderful wife)!
Our second laser cutter is up and running and we are beginning to cut cases daily. We received all of the acrylic (about 600 lbs of it for the cases), we'll try to get some pictures of the process for the next update. We plan to continue to cut them right through shipping and should have no problem keeping pace with both machines going.
Smartduino / Smartbus Open I/O Adapter
We have been working with Dimitri of the Smartduino project to help him design a Smartbus adapter for the Digispark shields. He has released this (check out his updates here), and generously offered it for free to all of his supporters. So if you have backed that project as well make sure to get one, and if you haven't check it out!
You can check it out here: smARtDUINO: Open System by former ARDUINO's manufacturer - 6 days left to get in on it.
The adapter will allow you to plug any of the Digispark shields into the Smartbus system, allowing you to control them with a Smartduino. Some shields might require small code changes, but all together it should be pretty plug and play. We think this is a great step to ensuring all of these Arduino based systems can share some common parts.
RGB + USB Demo Video
Finally, to help tide over our backers while they wait for the Digisparks we wanted to show off a very simple demo we put together. Here is a video of using the RGB Shield and a Digispark, connected to the computer via USB to have a computer controlled RGB LED - similar (albeit not as polished) to the Blink(1) - a DIY DigiBlink for $13 ($12 for a Digispark + $1 for the RGB) or less ($9 at quantity)!
Check out the video! - It's a bit rough, it's been a long week, but we hope it gives you some ideas for your Digisparks!
Note: When we enter a color change into the command line the change is immediate, it appears delayed in the video only because we wanted to show the fading capabilities.
When the Digisparks ship we will have a downloadable update for the Arduino IDE available - it will add Digispark support and install basic examples for all of the shields. We also have created some libraries to help with USB communication and debugging over USB that will be released with that. We also hope to have several demos like the one in this video, to jumpstart people's ideas and provide some basic examples of more advanced uses - from there we will leave it up to the community!
We are documenting this entire process, as well as the building of all the shields, and some getting started guides.
For those who want to know - some technical details on this demo:
- The command line program is python and libusb - cross platform ready
- It could have been written in anyhting with libusb (Python, C, C++, Ruby) or any language with access to USB HID Reports.
- The usb communication is done with USB-HID reports - no drivers needed
- The usb communication works both ways, to and from the Arduino (we are also working on a simple USB LCD demo!)
- We have a similar command line app to act like the Arduino serial monitor for debugging
- The python app handles converting colors to RGB values, the Digispark gets the RGB values and fades towards them
- Since one of the 3 PWM pins is shared with one of the USB pins, blue is being handled by software PWM
- We also have a demo app that checks a mailiantor.com account for new messages and changes the color to the color named in the subject, this allows us to use If This Then That (ifttt.com) to change the color on a variety of triggers.
- I encourage anyone who wants to discuss this or any other projects further to checkout the community forums at digistump.com/board
Thank you all again for your support and patience while we work to get Digisparks into your hands!
