PILED and the state of the Launchpad

A lot has happened since our last blog post...

• The RCOS hackathon (which was a great success) resulted in two different fully functional PILED wireless bluetooth control apps. Thanks to Zachary Clapper, there is now a functional Android app for controlling lighting levels (RGB mixing). In addition, an application was created for Windows allowing the PILED board to be run as a strobe, RGB mixer, or sequenced light effects.
• LIB3 and PILED demonstration materials for MakerFaire - LIB3 will be at MakerFaire this weekend! There will be several RGB LED fixtures, demo computers set up with the new control software, as well as some obligatory banners and such...
• TI has started shipping their new launchpad development boards - 4.99 will get you a Cortex M4 based system, with an 80MHz CPU, 32Kb ram, 256Kb flash, and 43 GPIO (Among other things, like 12 bit ADCs operating at 1000 ksps)... This is a pretty cool system - I can't wait for my order to get here. This also goes to show that TI has found their 'Launchpad' experiment to be successful enough to continue it with new, much more powerful models; the MSP430 launchpads are still available, and their community is expanding.