First of all, thanks to everyone who supported this project (you know who you are!), especially to all those that help me spread the word and share it with so many new people, you guys went out of your way to help and I appreciated it wholeheartedly.
The Laser Ball premiere was really a great first-step towards exploring this unique world of DIY/making and the online communities that support new ideas and new media. I learned a lot, not only on the technical side, but also on the right ways to try and communicate and share the project with everyone. For me it's been a great success and I hope to keep the momentum as things progress and evolve.
The story and video was picked up by a number of popular blogs and media sources included places like Engadget, Make, Slashgear, HackedGadgets, and Hack-a-day. It was even featured in the Instructable newsletter which ended up in Inboxes all over the world! The story of the Laser Ball even found a home on a variety of websites oversees, the stats from the Youtube link show lots of visitors from Chile, Brazil, Spain, and France! I made this pie-chart of a cross-section of viewer's countries with data from Youtube Insight, which provides a bag of stats for your Youtube videos. Gotta love the Information Age!
So what's next? Well this was just the beginning, the Instructable and video opened the doors and now it's time to step through the portal! The number one question has been: "can I buy one?" or "will you make me a Laser Ball?" So I just wanted to say that I'll be working to release the Laser Ball in a way that doesn't require the technicalities like soldering and programming in order to enjoy having one and playing with its features. This, of course, means buckle your seatbelts and start impatiently waiting for a near-future Laser Ball product release! It may be limited at first but my motto is: "Laser Balls for everyone" so there will definitely be opportunities for more people to get their hands on a Laser Ball, and hopefully one day, with a little luck, we'll all get together and play a good ol-fashion game of Laser Ball!
Until next time...
Great project! Thanks for sharing! And great musics too ;-)
ReplyDeleteThe presentation of your project was fantastic, but I am curious: who were the people who helped spread word of your project to these blogs? Friends or the instructable community?
ReplyDelete@Unknown - Thanks for your support! Spreading the word of the Laser Ball was a joint effort. Friends in my personal network played a big role via word-of-mouth. I also took it upon myself to spread the word by sending out small, personalized emails to several blogs which are happy to post new stories that they think their readership will enjoy. A lot of blogs also have a "submit a tip" link to make it easy for everyone/anyone to share stories and projects. With the Web 2.0 tools/framework that are available it's very easy for word to spread and for a community to form around a simple project like the Laser Ball. It's been a great to see it working first-hand and hopefully we can have as much success with future projects.
ReplyDeleteI was reading the datasheet for the atmega32u4 (http://pjrc.com/teensy/atmega32u4.pdf page 378-379) that the Teensy uses and it says that the maximum current draw for the chip is 200mA (between Vcc and GND), and that groups of output pins shouldn't exceed 100mA combined current. Are you concerned about exceeding and damaging the Teensy's power limit?
ReplyDelete@Sanders - Thanks for the feedback! I actually was concerned about the current consumption... and then I decided to just try it out and it worked! So I thought I might have overlooked some fact... but it hasn't uncovered itself so once I get some more time I'll follow-up on this and see if there isn't a logical explanation.
ReplyDelete