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Community Driven Project
Long story short: Over the past week there has been a lot of noise surrounding these things, and for good reason. They are rather impressive devices. As a projector I can kind of see why they went with the diode source. The blue light is slightly acitinic and lends to very light fluorescence on the projection surface. This makes for one hell of a high impact blue... In my opinion this color in the past has always felt a little washed out, this does not appear to be the case here. Hell, I almost want to keep a unit as a 4th monitor and lug this around instead of my LCD. The projector is so light and assuming the bulbs last as long as they do it really is a solid projector with some serious geek appeal. I hate to think of these things being used for boring powerpoint projections.
This product has been, as you are all aware, a polarizing event here at PL. I haven't seen this much excitement surrounding a product in quite a while. Hell, Day one blew the previous "Max Users Online" record wide open. This is somewhat bittersweet given that I had a hand in setting the previous record with that "First" 405nM pointer.
Now to the magic side of this: Some of the best minds(and one Janitor) PL has to offer are weighing in on this product. After a lenghty discussion with Heroic in the IRC #PL channel she is going full steam ahead making a professional quality/hobbyist price TEC controller that at its core will have custom microcontroller code to handle all the features planned for it... Everything is modular from fan controls, diode driver predelay, a humidity sensor and bidirectional temperature control. Theres probably a kitchen sink header in there too. Very exciting to say the least.
To sweeten the pot: It is going to be open source. All of it. Everything down to the name of the product. We were in IRC earlier and were unable to come up with a name... we tossed around "Thermawesome", "Thermoic", "HeroThermAwesomeBacon^2", "TECno", "Full Peltier", "Fear and Loathing in Thermobaric Land", "Leonard Peltier and his cone of coldness", "SmartWatt", "Chill Bill", "Chico Chico Rainmaker", "FreeCold" and "Heroic Coldblaster3000"... So in the spirit of open source: Please come up with names for the product. Best one submitted by the community and approved by Heroic will be chosen.
Theres a lot of work to be done on the mechanical side of things. I am a big fan of the community development ideology. Everything that is needed that can be sourced through the community will. Rough idea so far involves Dr.Lava's diode drivers, Mechanical and optical ninjary from MechEng3, Laserman532's mechanical expertise, Pangolin's LASORB's... and who knows who else will come to the table, but it is truly come one come all.
This is very VERY exciting! And I will do my level best to keep the development status open and on display in this thread or another one to keep the SNR up there.
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HeroTEC 3K) - Dsli_jon
