A while back Nadja Oertelt approached us about doing a bit for her show Motherboard on Vice TV. Having seen the show (it’s awesome!) we were psyched about the offer. But, we were unfortunately deep into the prototyping phase of project and had little to show. A few all nighters later we had gotten close to getting three demos working:

1) Autonomous hover with a simple linear feedback controller on an RC plane
2) Programmable guitar pedal
3) Simple video processing on board the FPGA

If only the VBS crew had showed up a day later, we might have had a lot of neat content ready for them. Of course, even the hardest of all night hackfests isn’t enough to bring a fresh board – straight off the soldering iron – to life in such varied, visually compelling ways. At the end of the shoot, all we had to show was the left overs of the weekend devel-o-thon, an RC plane with some not-so-functional electronics, and the prototype boards themselves. Ugh. We were devastated we had messed up this opportunity.

The folks over at VBS did an amazing job turning what we did have into a great piece, which you should watch here. I love what came out of that footage and we owe a big thanks to Nadja for doing so much with so little. To be honest I was somewhat dreading the piece – a misplaced apprehension. I love it.

That said, its a few months and a few prototype revisions later. We have a lot more to show! This time, however, we won’t make the mistake of jumping the gun – we can’t wait to show off some demos once they’re as spit-polished as we’d like. Besides the demo’s, however, we’ve made a ton of improvements on the hardware end of things. We offer the lighter Maple board without the FPGA that is fully arduino compatible. We are really committed to building off the great success of those little boards-in-blue, staying open source and creative commons the whole way! If you like what were up to, drop us a line or sign up for our news letter!
info@leaflabs.com