Making sure pixelstick is OFF, insert your SD card. Hold down the LEFT and RIGHT keys on the directional keypad and turn pixelstick ON. The screen will be titled "Pixelstick updater v1.0" and display the message "Firmware Found, Press fire to update." If the message reads "No Firmware Found" then turn off the pixelstick, eject the SD card and check on your computer that the firmware files are saved correctly to the root of the SD card. The message should now read "LOADING." for a short time, and then "UPDATE COMPLETE, PLEASE RESET". The pixelstick splash screen should appear as normal and you can see a revised version number in the bottom right corner.Hey Duncan and Stephen! Please tell us a bit about yourselves and what you do. We’re two childhood friends with a passion for making things. In 2011, we pooled our mutual wealth of ideas and skill-sets and formed Bitbanger Labs as an outlet for our ideas. What’s the story behind the Pixelstick? How did you come up with the idea for it? Since then we’ve had two successful launches on Kickstarter, the most recent of which was Pixelstick, our exciting and unique photography tool. Pixelstick has it’s origins in Duncan’s work as a freelance stock photographer, where he first began building electronic rigs to help him get the types of shots he needed. After some early success in building functional photography equipment, Duncan got the idea to try and mimic the process of physically silk-screening a t-shirt in a photograph, and pixelstick was born. The Pixelstick can be used to create amazing light paintings as well as stop-motion and time-lapse animations - what’s the most incredible thing you’ve seen people use it for? The first images we created “pulling” a length of LEDs through a long exposure to paint a fully formed image were visually compelling, and we were convinced other photographers would agree. Wow, there have been so many! It’s tough to choose just one. We were immediately surprised and pleased to see how many global brands were excited to use pixelstick in their creative. Early on, we saw commercials for Audi, Volkswagen, and Citroen that used Pixelstick to great effect. Not long after we were treated to a full length music video for the band U2 that used pixelstick throughout. With the Pixelstick being your second successful crowdfunding project, what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve encountered during these campaigns? If we had to pick just one, we’d probably have to say that seeing pixelstick used extensively in the Season 40 credits and bumpers for Saturday Night Live was one of the more surreal and satisfying moments since launch. The two projects presented two somewhat different sets of challenges. Our first campaign, Remee, was very much a learning process throughout. At the time, we had no experience whatsoever with manufacturing or mass-market industrial design, so each step was new territory and we had to rely on a project management liaison, which came with somewhat nebulous markups. Our second launch, Pixelstick, was a much more complex product to design and produce, and we had to limit overhead and unnecessary expenses to keep the price to consumers low. Because of this, we forewent the liaison and managed the production ourselves: identifying and inspecting vendors, managing international logistics, and personally overseeing final assembly and QC. It was a massive undertaking, easily our biggest challenge to date, but we proved ourselves equal to the task, shipping a product that exceeded expectations and garnering invaluable on-the-ground production experience. What was the technical process of designing the Pixelstick like i.e. how did you decide on the dimensions of it? We had to keep pixelstick lightweight (~2kg), sturdy, and relatively portable, but still long enough to reproduce high fidelity images in-camera. We landed on 6ft (1.9M) long, which, when disassembled into the included 43" (110cm) bag, allows pixelstick to be carried on to most airlines. The 200 LED pixel density at this length We used a rigid, lightweight aluminum extrusion of our own design for the housing, and a simple center-mating locking mechanism that allows the device to quickly break into two pieces with the turn of two thumbscrews. Do you have any advice to people who have little to no experience in light-painting? Normal light-painting is simple enough, but the Pixelstick brings it to an entirely new level. Our goal wasn’t to replace traditional lightpainting, but to augment it.
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