The Pirates of Pimoroni are one year old today. In my own plundering of their twitter feed I can say that - In their first year they've shipped a staggering 60,000 Pibows going to 60 different countries. To make those they've cut half a million layers (9 slices x 60,000 Pibows for those fact checkers out there) from 14 tonnes of acrylic, packed a mind numbing 250,000 nuts and wrapped the latest 40,000 of them in very handsome retail packaging.
We first met Pimoroni at EMF camp on the first of September last year. Having already seen a few examples of the tasty little case in the wild I was very excited to see one close up. Paul handed me a case and I quickly squirreled it away to appreciate it when I had a quiet moment - not happy with this Paul presented me with another one to open right away and build in front of the small group gathered around. The packaging was laser cut from cardboard and really very lovely - inside was a sheet of A4 with Ikea style instructions and I remember being particularly impressed with the little purple off cut spanner thing.
Paul had a small number of Pibows with him, which he allowed me to sell for him to attract people to my other wares! He then disappeared to enjoy the camp whilst I manned my market stall in the Nottinghack tent, where after a flurry of activity I was once more without Pibows. Paul appeared later with coffee, for which I am eternally grateful. He left with a few bits and bobs, which I believe became the prototype for the Picade. Paul also gained an Adafruit Raspberry Pi Patch from us, he did attempt to purchase it but it would have been a bit off since he designed the logo!
I don't think I've shared this photo before, because if you look closely there is a big booger on Paul's left nostril.
Since then we've seen the explosion of Pimoroni - a staggering 4% of all Raspberry Pis are thought to be clad in one of the variants of the Pibow. With one of them even making the cover or Wired Magazine in the UK.
I have to say that setting up next to them at the UK Maker Faire was somewhat intimidating - with their wall of stock and massive success in their sails - but ever the gentlemen they were great neighbors and even sent us back with some stock at a great rate!
I think that's part of the success of Pimoroni, they've got great products and have worked exceptionally hard (if you have a laser cutter try manning it constantly for a few days!) but they've always been good to those around them.
What's next for Pimoroni then? Well I don't know, they won't tell me, but it involves a pick and place and a wave soldering machine... watch this space.
Last week we got some great products in store, all of which can be found in our New Products Category. Part of what we're currently trying to achieve is a consistent offering over our "sales channels" so that if you find something on our eBay store you can find it here on our website with 10% off, as eBay charge us 10% to sell items on there. With that in mind a few product combinations that have on eBay have come to our store this week. Including the Bumper Jumper Bundle.
The bundle is just a whole load of jumpers that should keep you going for a while including:
- 55 x ~100mm Male-Male Jumpers
- 10 x ~120mm Male-Male Jumpers
- 5 x ~180mm Male-Male Jumpers
- 5 x ~220mm Male-Male Jumpers
- 25 x ~12mm Male-Female Jumpers
- 25 x ~12mm Female-Female Jumpers
The idea being with this in your tool kit you're not going to run short any time soon. All the individual parts are available elsewhere but are packaged together to save time. Keep these with your Multiholder for super smooth prototyping.
We also received a whole bunch of cool new stuff from Adafruit. We concentrated on the "blinky" element with their NeoPixel products using the WS2812 LED, which is an RGB LED with an internal WS2811 IC. This allows you to chain and address them using an astounding single output. You will of course need a GND and Vin.
Rather fantastic photography there don't you agree? There's more too!
These are the Breadboard-friendly RGB Smart Neopixels and come in a pack of four but don't have any headers with them. Luckily we have them here. The LED is soldered for you so you can get up can going very quickly. They recommend keeping them less than 15cm apart so the signal stays strong.
If four NeoPixels isn't enough for you we got a version with eight of them attached in a handy, tasty, stick.
As before these are chainable and Adafruit even has a well written library for the product available here.
As a feast of blinky, we were almost full. Just almost though as they also released this monster of blink...
And wow, 40 LEDs crammed onto a shield for Arduino. That's a Lot of LEDs and what's more they're presoldered, I know soldering is fun, but anyone who was soldered the Jimmie Rodgers LoL shield will appreciate the work having been done for you!
So apart from the buying of things and putting them on the website we also took a little time to finish a product that was foolishly benched (literally the first cut was behind the monitor on my bench for the last 12 weeks!).
Designed as a "cart filler" for those stopping by for Raspberry Pi items. It's a version of Simon Monk's Raspberry Leaf but cut from laminate plastic, the files are available on thingiverse for those of you with a laser and they're just 99p for those of you without!
