Over the past week I finalized the pcb schematics for the Pixel PCB and began ordering the components necessary to prototype the electronics. What follows is the result of many emails, phone calls, and a lot of time spent in IRC.

This is the second Pixel Heartbeat.

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Electronics is a relatively new territory for me, having started tinkering with electronics in early 2012 (compared to designing software since 2001). Making the jump to manufacturing electronics is kind of like moving from designing static HTML websites to implementing a robust backend for a major international website:

Many processes evolve significantly as you scale up.

What works on a small soldering bench won’t work when you’re building 1600 physical manifestations of something, so it requires a whole new way of thinking about the process. As I learn these new skills I’ve decided to collect my thoughts and research in a central location so that others may hopefully follow my path and accelerate their own understanding.

This is the first issue of The Pixel Heartbeat.

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Research on Pixel Heart v2 has begun. My goal with this iteration is to accomplish the following:

Check Pixel Heart as luggage on a plane.

Pretty simple, but quite the challenging mission.

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