If Imitation Is the Most Sincere Form of Flattery, Lixie Labs Should Be Flattered by the COPIXE!

We recently touched on Pixie, the modular, daisy-chainable serial pixel display from Lixie Labs. Suffice to say, it's been immensely popular, with parts flying off the production line, into packets ready for postage out to people around the globe who have purchased them!

In what can may be described as game recognizing game, Alex from TinyLEDMatrix sought to secure a few Pixie display units for himself, only to be met with the problems of popularity — the dreaded "out of stock" note on the product page.

Thing is, as his Twitter handle might indicate, Alex also knows a thing or two about lumping loads of LEDs into a limited area. If you've not seen his 196LED project, go and check it out — it's a thing of beauty!

In what is probably one of the fastest responses to a product launch, COPIXIE is very much a creation that builds on the developments already done in the Pixie product.

With more than enough experience in laying out dense grids of tiny LEDs as matrices, Alex, when faced with limited stock of the Pixie, turned his skillset to designing his own derivative product, with COPIXIE instead choosing to implement the LED indicator elements found in the Pixie's LTP-305HR directly on the PCB itself!

Not only does this discrete diode design reduce the dependence on the old, legacy LTP-305HR parts — which are only going to become harder to source! — it opens up a world of possibilities when it comes to specifying colors to suit your design. Now, you can choose to source hyper-bright blue, or a prominent pink or purple LED, all commonly available in 0402 packaging — something that's not going to be a factory standard option for prefabbed LED matrix displays!

Designed as a drop-in replacement for Pixie, in terms of both physical design and sharing the same parts — save for the display units themselves — means that the board can run the Pixie firmware, further reducing the amount of time needed to get this variation of the original design up and running.

Seen below, the device is sat talking to a TinyPICO, with the COPIXIE running the Pixie F/W on its own ATtiny MCU.

While the first revision of the COPIXIE needed a small amount of board rework, it looks like rev 2 will surely be a success, and a viable alternative for those looking to build upon the proven design of the Pixie hardware!

Beyond the design of COPIXIE itself, we're very excited to see the programming fixture that TinyLEDMatrix has come up with, based around the a similar clamp-fixture design as we've seen previously deployed in the ATE for the OrangeCrab.

With a simple bit of 3D-printed jigging, this humble clamp is put into service as an effective test and programming fixture, ready to help churn through the PCBA as they come out of the oven!

We'll be sure to update as and when TinyLEDMatrix releases the design source for COPIXIE over on his GitHub, but until then, follow along with the developments by giving Alex a follow on Twitter (@TinyLEDMatrix).