![]() ![]() Too many times during my tests did one of the little black screws come loose and fall to the ground, nearly lost to me forever. When you consider the notion that the Pixelstick will be primarily used in the dark, it would have been nice to see at least one or two white, flashlight LEDs embedded on the rear of the metal frame, switched on independently of the front LEDs. It may be fine when it’s 80° outside, but a few of the nights we went out to test the Pixelstick were at or near freezing, making a battery change a very, very painful experience for my poor hands. This battery compartment needs a better solution, plain and simple. Powering each of the 200 LEDs are 8 AA’s in a holder that needs to be (at least mine did) forcefully squeezed into the hard cloth compartment mounted to the frame of the pixel stick. Thankfully, the Pixelstick doesn’t do anything proprietary, fancy, or backward for a power supply. This is a hard prediction to make, I know, but there’s probably enough strength and, maybe more importantly, just enough flex in the frame to allow leeway for when that dreaded drop or other accident inevitably happens. The aluminum frame of the Pixelstick is very sturdy, and I don’t foresee anyone having general build issues with it down the road. But nothing that makes me think the Pixelstick isn’t worth every penny of the $350 asking price. Fortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case.Įverything about the Pixelstick feels well done and quite thought-out. Multiple independent sticks could certainly be fired simultaneously with the same remote, which is an intriguing idea that we’re excited to explore.The first thing that I always evaluate when I tackle a product like this-especially one with no real competition-is build quality.īeing first to market, the first model produced by Bitbanger Labs, I hoped this wouldn’t be a “yeah it’s great but it broke in one week” sort of product. Power immediately becomes an issue when you talk about daisy chaining or stacking. Shutterstock: How did you decide on 198 pixels for the height? In theory, could you make significantly taller Pixelsticks, or allow for multiple Pixelsticks to be combined in some way?ĭuncan Frazier: In theory, yes, in practice, no. It was only the overwhelming and unexpected response that forced us to completely rethink the idea. It was always meant to be larger animal, whereas we went into our previous project with the supposition that we’d be hand soldering a couple of hundred boards ourselves. ![]() Right now, we’re pretty happy with the path set before Pixelstick. Shutterstock: Will exceeding your Kickstarter goal change the version of the product you expect to release?ĭuncan Frazier: We’re always pushing to improve our design. ![]() We’re excited to see what other creative folks can create. We were pretty stunned at the range of things we were able to do with Pixelstick just in our video, and we’re quite certain we’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible. Once we were more dialed in on that front, it allowed us to focus on technique. Early on, we were just getting comfortable with Pixelstick and slowly refining things to make it more usable. How much time have you had to experiment with the prototype so far? Have people gotten in touch with concepts for which Pixelstick might be well suited?ĭuncan Frazier: Pixelstick has been alive, in some form or another, for well over two years, and we’ve been shooting with the current prototype for a few months now. Shutterstock: The moment we saw your invention in action (via your Kickstarter video), we started thinking about a wide variety of things that would be fun to try out. That’s when we moved to custom circuit boards with a much denser LED layout, and Pixelstick began to take shape. Early prototypes functioned as proofs of concept, but the quality we sought still wasn’t there. We started thinking about ways we could use our tech backgrounds to possibly produce more interesting, high-quality results. Shutterstock: How did the original idea behind Pixelstick come about?ĭuncan Frazier: We’ve always been avid light painters (and timelapse lovers), but we were never quite satisfied with the fidelity. ![]()
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