My understanding is that Adafruit harvests these buttons from Glowforge units lost over the last couple years of product development. Now that units have been shipped for mass destruction… er… final durability and other testing, the supply is great enough to make them affordable. These are your first step in creating your own competing laser cutter!
I s’pose you could use it for other stuff, too. Adafruit mentions some neat ideas about using them for user feedback in their video. Probably some of the same kind of ideas Glowforge is using, I’d guess. Anywho, I know there are at least a few people on here that like to do projects that might use this kind of thing.
I’ve been checking them out, although I’d really wished they’d used a neopixel rather than discrete LEDs for the color. Not that it’s hard to PWM yourself, but the problem then is your micro controller has to constantly keep them dimmed, and the moment it does something else your lighting glitches. That’s not a problem with an arduino which is deterministic, but on a RPi that can be a serious problem…
Not sure if you watched the video, but she predicted that now that they offer the RGB buttons that people have been demanding folks would start asking why it wasn’t made with a neopixel!
I don’t often watch their new products video, as they are “low density” for information/time. I always read the new products postings every couple of days, but videos take 10 minutes for 2 minutes worth of reading (and they constantly have AV problems). I love many of LadyAda’s other videos but rarely the new products ones. But amusing that she realized that.
Last week I already had the thought “Well, surely the button can be hacked to stick a Neopixel in there instead.”
I have a handful of single color buttons like these for my electric car project, however the interior lighting will be NeoPixels and it would be nice to be able to match the colors. Even better if they could be handled like every other pixel without any special setup.
