I dragged Ishani’s Rev2 to the Big Chill this past weekend. Initially, we were planning on making a run of the stripped-down Rev3 to hand out, but a stack of other committments got in the way.
In the process, I learned some valuable lessons:
- Battery life “in the wild” will always be shorter than expected. We got between two and three hours out of it with a typical pattern. Field-replaceable batteries might be a sensible option.
- Perceived brightness varies widely with ambient light (duh!). While having panel intensity embedded in the animation data is nice, some sort of brightness control on the device would be nice as well as useful for extending battery life.
- Laptops are not particularly festi-friendly. Even my little EEEPC was a bother to tote around. Aside from swapping patterns from time to time, it was only used for recharging.
- Finally, there was so much going on to hear and see I wasn’t hugely interested in playing with silly electronics!
