Donations / Lightshow Pi Kits

[Todd Giles]

A couple items I'd like to ask this group about - as you are those that have put much of your own time into making this project what it is today.

(1) Donating to Lightshow Pi

There have been many people ask me how they can donate to the project, and for the most part I tell them to contribute with time in the community helping others, or contributing back to the code-base like each of you have.

I'd like to make a formal donations page on the Lightshow Pi webpage that talks about the various levels of Donating people can make to the project, something along the lines of this page from the open lighting project:

https://www.openlighting.org/openlightingproject/get-involved/contributing/

I'm open to accepting monetary donations and / or hardware donations that I'd like to then use to directly improve the project through primarily purchasing hardware for developers to use ... i.e. I don't want to use it to make myself or any of us $ ... but rather to enable us to make Lightshow Pi better.  How we'd work out what hardware we acquire and whom we send it to is TBD ... I'd like to make it a somewhat formal process though to avoid misuse of donated funds.  I'm happy to have feedback on this from each / all of you.

I'd also love to pass along some percentage (perhaps 50%) towards a charity that we agree upon (how to agree upon said charity TBD).

(2) Lightshow Pi Kits

So, I have 6 kids at home ... and a couple of them (my 16 and 15 year olds) have expressed interest to me in making Lightshow Pi kits that we would then sell to people.  I'm intrigued by this idea, and would love to give my kids the opportunity to make a bit of $ while also learning more about electronics / programming.  I haven't flushed out the details of this - but our current thought was to start with a simple 8 channel RPi + SSR Sainsmart based setup and provide both a do-it-yourself kit where we'd simply purchase and package all the required parts, and then also a pre-built kit that is ready to go, with Lightshow Pi already installed.

I have no idea price points on this at this point, but seeking initial feedback from this group to see if anyone would object to me advertising such kits on the Lightshow Pi website and G+ community.  If you do have any concern with this - please let me know!

Thanks all for reading to this email, and thanks for such an amazing ride this project has been so far, and hopefully will continue to be for all of us, and many more!

-Todd

[Stephen Burning]

No Objections here.  Would the kit money(profit margin) go to charity also?  I think that would be a great way to help improve peoples lives in some way while still learning about electronics and learn about the gift of giving.  The monetary donations could pay for the expenses of running the website and the cost of the domain and such.  Do you plan on starting an official LLC or nonprofit or something to take in the donations in the name of the organization / donate in the name of the organization?  Also, have you considered the liability of selling a preassembled kit and what responsibility is on you if a the wiring is not up to code/causes damage due to a fire/ some gets electricuted.. etc..  I support the idea and i'm not trying to scare anyone here, i just dont want to see you get sued or someone get hurt or worse.  Just things to think about and be aware of. 

[chris usey]

I have no objections either. I initially thought the same as Stephen.  I have been asked several times to assemble boxes for others and I had to decline out of fear of being sued etc if something were to go wrong. I have no problem if I burn my house down ( i mean I do lol but you get the point ) but If something were to go wrong with a box I put together for someone what might I be facing in that instance. Just like Steven said, Im only mentioning this to put it out there, I would hate to see you go through something like that when the only goal you have is to teach others and help others.

As far as donations, Whatever you decide to do with it is fine by me, as I said last year this was your dream child, what direction you choose to go with it is totally your choice. 

- Chris 

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[Todd Giles]

Thanks for the advice on reasons why not to supply assembled boxes ... I must admit I hadn't thought through the negative sides all that much, and I'm just looking for more ways to get my kids involved.  Perhaps providing a kit that you assemble yourself puts me less liable?  I'll have to investigate before going down this path too far.

I'll work on a donations page and pass it by you all before making it public.

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[Paul]

Todd:

I have to start off with a 'congrats!' I would imagine that when you started putting this stuff together, you had no idea it would grow to what it is today ;-)

I think donations are fine. Maybe if it were setup such that it could provide hardware to developers for testing and expansion, that could really kick start things to move forward. Just like Tom bringing up using 433mhz, the donations could be used to provide that type of hardware to some developers who potentially could not participate otherwise.

I guess it would be up to you at that point if you wanted to put a 'deliverable' on providing hardware. You send some hardware to a developer and include a reasonable deliverable on it (code for testing or what-have-you.) That might be difficult but is something to keep in mind. I bought all kinds of triacs and drivers a while back, but would not have been able to deliver anything as the Pi is too slow to drive them properly (for PWM at least.)

At the same time, to play devil's advocate, originally you said that you wanted to keep LSP as simple and close to an "it just works, easy, out of the box" project as possible.
Feature creep isn't always bad, sometimes it's a very good thing; might be something to re-evaluate to see if the project needs to branch: one for the 'easy, off-the-shelf' version and one for the hacker-type who wants to go crazy with it by integrating arduinos or other micros or what-have-you, or maybe both types can be served by the same version.
Unfortunately I've not had the time recently to contribute, so take what I put here with a grain of salt (or two) ;-)

I plan on getting back into helping develop and test and will be starting a new job soon so I will finally have some free time (I hope)
cheers!
Paul

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[Todd Giles]

On Wed, Dec 2, 2015 at 11:34 AM Paul <dunn...@gmail.com> wrote:

Todd:

I have to start off with a 'congrats!' I would imagine that when you started putting this stuff together, you had no idea it would grow to what it is today ;-)

I think donations are fine. Maybe if it were setup such that it could provide hardware to developers for testing and expansion, that could really kick start things to move forward. Just like Tom bringing up using 433mhz, the donations could be used to provide that type of hardware to some developers who potentially could not participate otherwise.

I guess it would be up to you at that point if you wanted to put a 'deliverable' on providing hardware. You send some hardware to a developer and include a reasonable deliverable on it (code for testing or what-have-you.) That might be difficult but is something to keep in mind. I bought all kinds of triacs and drivers a while back, but would not have been able to deliver anything as the Pi is too slow to drive them properly (for PWM at least.)

Great thoughts, right along what I was considering.  I'd love to motivate people to continue to use / play with the software, and reward some developers for their contribution with hardware that would allow them to improve their shows / contribute / test more...

 

At the same time, to play devil's advocate, originally you said that you wanted to keep LSP as simple and close to an "it just works, easy, out of the box" project as possible.
Feature creep isn't always bad, sometimes it's a very good thing; might be something to re-evaluate to see if the project needs to branch: one for the 'easy, off-the-shelf' version and one for the hacker-type who wants to go crazy with it by integrating arduinos or other micros or what-have-you, or maybe both types can be served by the same version.
Unfortunately I've not had the time recently to contribute, so take what I put here with a grain of salt (or two) ;-)

I appreciate these commet Paul - and my original goal stays the same - I want to ensure LSP stays simple for the new users - any new features must not make it harder for the new user.

That said, if architected properly - I think we could re-organize things to allow for advanced users to provide all sorts of plug-ins.  My main repository would stay focused on the original easy to use use-case and potentially pull in some of the more popular plug-ins, but allow anyone to publish their own plug-ins to the base LSP.

I love all the learning opportunities this project has provided so many people, and hope to maintain that as well.

 

I plan on getting back into helping develop and test and will be starting a new job soon so I will finally have some free time (I hope)
cheers!

New job == more free time ;)  Nice, what's the job so I can join with you? ;)

 

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[Tom Enos]

Personalty my thinking is if you (Todd) don't need the money to support the project then we should donate it back to those who do.  I don't mean users that need stuff, but local, nationwide, for world wide charities that would use the money to help people in need TBD.  

Hardware donations (if accepted) should go to the project leader (Todd) and he should decide whom is working on that aspect of the project  and their need for that hardware.  Each developer requesting hardware should be able to state their need and timeline for the use of the hardware.  As an example I would not be the recipient of 5050 leds, 3528 leds. RPI's (I have 3), Arduinos (as I have 2 Unos, a pro mini, a nano, and a mega), 433mhz tx and rx modules, and APA104's.  And at the end development we would be required to return the item to the project leader (Todd) for additional review or to another member of the dev team for review, so we don't see it as we got a free item.  I have several item I would be willing to place in the que, if I knew that developer would use it for the project.  I am sure I could find a use for 5 Arduninos, but I could easily donate a few of them to the project.  The pro mini, nano and one of the unos were bought just for testing with lightshowpi, so if another dev needs them it's just a matter of saying so.  The same goes for the rgb 3528 leds, I don't need 7meters of these things and if you have a development need just say so.  And I have a few strips of 2811-12, so if you think you can integrate them just say the word.  I have hardware that I would be willing to donate to the project, I really already did, it's just that I am the only one using it.

As for providing hardware for sale.  I had this same Idea, but failed to account for liability.  We should only offer ideas and suggestions on a design.  At most a BOM for the parts and instruction on how to use it.

[Paul Barnett]

I'll echo Chris's concerns about liability.  I don't think you should sell a product that uses 120 VAC without getting UL certification, and that's a lot of effort.  I'm not sure about kits, either.  I had already expressed my concern about some of the builds that I've seen, although I'm not an electrician!  If you simply write a bill of materials, I will suggest consulting a certified electrician so that you at least make a recommendation for the right parts.

However, I'll offer an alternative:  build it with low voltage, only.  I just bought a spiral Christmas tree (for clearance prices!) that is normally powered by 3 AA batteries.   I'm going to see what I can do with the lights and a RPI 2 B+, although ultimately I plan to strip the lights off the plastic guide and replace them with individually controllable RGB LEDs.   

The RGB LEDs with the WS2801 control chips offer a lot of flexibility, but they are pretty expensive.  The best I've seen is $50 for 50 LEDs, although the build quality of the sample I bought was atrocious.  I'm planning to buy them from another source, at $40 per 25 LEDs. 

My choice for a charity:  DonorsChoose.org.  My wife is a retired math/science teacher, and we just made a contribution to fund several classroom projects.    One of them was to buy lab materials for a group of middle school girls to learn simple electronics:  http://www.donorschoose.org/project/circuit-girls-can-steam-their-world/1732173/, and another for simple programmable robots:  http://www.donorschoose.org/project/busy-bees-take-over-stem-class/1829098/.