| Hi, Pixelblaze guy here :)
I totally get where you are coming from. It would be nice if you could drop this on any old board and be up and running. Hopefully I can share some of my perspective. Pixelblaze is a commercial venture for me, and I have to figure out how to make some $ from it to pay for my time so that I can keep making it better. I can't afford to spend the amount of time that I do on a hobby, and I don't have a sponsor. If I figure out a way to open source it and have financial incentive to keep working on it, I'll do that. I've been carving out bits and pieces to open source that I think are useful utilities. The hardware itself solves a few problems, such as level shifting, that I haven't see embedded on other esp8266 boards. It also provides a platform for more interesting hardware such as the (fully OSS+OSH) sensor expansion board. On the pricing side of things, the hardware isn't a majority of the cost. OTOH I'm never going to compete with the $3 boards w/ free shipping. I don't have the volume where I can drop the per unit 'software overhead' to a level where I'm competitive with the low end Chinese markets. The price of the product as a whole is very competitive in this market. There are cheap no-feature (completely closed) LED controllers for not much less, and high-end controllers start in the hundreds of dollars. --------- If you want to replicate something like the language in Pixelblaze, it's not so bad. Its syntactically ES6, though without many of the dynamic features of JavaScript. Michael Leibman (@michaelleibman) put together this codepen that emulates Pixelblaze compatibility here: https://codepen.io/mleibman/pen/WMVbVq?editors=0010 You could use that as a starting point for some kind of RPi nodejs app that pushes pixel data to your ESPs, or perhaps port the functions (they aren't rocket science) to Python. I toyed with the idea, but realized I have too many hobbies already :) |