LED Sign for $15

[jcb]

Greetings. I hope this is the right forum. I would hate to screw up my first (real) post

. It's not a flashlight, but it is definitely LED related.

KB Toy stores are selling (liquidating?) a scrolling LED sign for $14.99. It's called the "Be-Boppin' Boogie Lights: Programmable Message Light".

It was originally $50, is marked down to $25, but when I brought it up to the register, it rang up as $14.99. I bought a second one at another KB, and it was the same price.

This thing is pretty nice. It has a 72x7 red LED matrix (504 LEDs!). It has an alphanumeric keyboard, a clock mode, and runs on 4 C cells. I've always wanted one of these.

Regards,
jcb

 

[The_LED_Museum]

Can somebody snag one of these for me plaese? There isn't a KB around here. :-/

 

[WayneM]

FYI -
http://www.kbtoys.com/w/l/snb.html?txt=Boogie+Lights&searchDropDown=entire&formInfo=T%7Ctxt%7C0%7C50&formMap=

 

[The_LED_Museum]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by WayneM:
FYI -
http://www.kbtoys.com/w/l/snb.html?txt=Boogie+Lights&searchDropDo wn=entire&formInfo=T%7Ctxt%7C0%7C50&formMap=<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

What forms of payment do you accept?
We accept MasterCard, Visa, American Express and Discover. Unfortunately, we can't accept International credit cards or any credit card with a billing address outside the United States, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico and Guam. Sorry, no checks or money orders.

That so sucks. Isn't my money green enough for them?

Darell, if you would please do the honours... No hurry, I don't think it's a time restricted thing like the Arc stuff is. Cheapest shipping you can find too - things are starting to peter out here. Thanks.

;p

This would look so cool displaying "Welcome to The LED Museum" or whatever else on top of my workstation.

 

[TrevorNasko]

i feel like i should send it to you no charge after all you did for me- wonder if mom and pop would catch me

 

[vcal]

There is a K-B store 2 miles away from my house

-guess where I'm going tomorrow??

 

[WayneM]

Got mine at lunch today. It even comes with the batteries. I'm the envy of my cube farm.

 

[Darell]

Craig -

I'll drop by a local store today. If they have 'em I'll get us each one. Otherwise, I'll order one up for you later this evening.

 

[JohnG]

jcb,

Thanks for the info.
I picked up two of them yesterday. Very nice indeed.

 

[aznduece]

Website says $24.99, are you sure we can get them for $14.99?

 

[Chris M.]

I bought a proffesional one of those a couple years back, for use as part of my festive illuminations. Extruded alum case, IR remote control and optional PC programming utility, if they`d sold the durn software and serial lead (which they didn`t).
http://electriclights.tripod.com/displays/2000night10.htm

Cost me the equivalent of US$150

(and that`s cheap for one of them). And here`s something that does essentially the same job for 10 times less?

Damn. British shops sure do suck some times....

 

[JohnG]

aznduece,

As of Sunday, the 12th, the brick and morter stores had 40% off the lowest ticketed price.
Hopefully the sale will continue this week too.

 

[jcb]

Craig,

If Darell doesn't find one at his local KB, I picked up an extra one that I can ship to you.

Regards,
jcb

 

[The_LED_Museum]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by jcb:
Craig,

If Darell doesn't find one at his local KB, I picked up an extra one that I can ship to you.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Thanks! (and thank you Darell too).

The more I find all this neat stuff that Seattle doesn't have, the more I realise how much Seattle sucks.

 

[lemlux]

I just bought one at the kaybee in Leucadia, Ca. They have three more at the $14.99 price. The demo unit I saw looked fairly dim in the store fluorescents. I think I'll have to have the lights dim or off to really apreciate it.

For what it's worth, the dusty packages at this store were initially priced at $79.99 before multiple markdowns.

 

[Darell]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by jcb:
If Darell doesn't find one at his local KB, I picked up an extra one that I can ship to you.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
Well, there weren't any at MY local store. Looks like jcb is your guy on this one Craig. I can't see a way to order them for less than the $25 that keeps showing up in the online store.

As long as we've got Craig set up, I think I'll pass on this one.

 

[Wingerr]

Went to the local KB and saw about 7 of these sitting on the shelf. Almost all the batteries were dead, though; must have left it switched on. The brightness is decent with a fresh set of batteries; the store demo probably had weak cells. I taped a few AA's together to use in it, since I have so many AA's and no C's.

There's apparently two versions of LED's used in these; one uses diffuse red LED's and another with clear. The clear ones show small bright spot, so the characters look more dotty and angle of view is narrower. The diffuse one is much better for signage purposes, so make sure you get the diffuse version.
Three position switch for brightness, but there's not a tremendous difference between high/mid/low.

12 character wide display-

This particular store had them marked at $29.95, with 50% off.

$15 seems to be my irresistable price point for these gizmos.

If you go to the kbtoys.com site, you can get a 10% coupon that you can use to drop the price even more, at the store.

 

[The_LED_Museum]

And look what else came today!

This is the new "Boogie-Lights" LED message board.
Shown in clock mode. The colons between the numbers are there, they just weren't on when the shutter opened.

See how easy it is to program? I've seen $400 professional message boards that weren't this easy to use. It isn't even that hard to correct misspellings, like the one shown here.

The LEDs in this version are the small transparent case type, rather than the diffused ones normally used on message boards.

A shot of the keyboard & lid by itself.

The controller has no censor, so you can fill it with obscenities and it will happily beam them to whomever is in sight. Nice to give the kids on a long car ride, where they can type "F**K YOU A**HOLE!" or something else equally creative and stick it in the back window of your car. OOOPS!!!

The only real downside is that user memory is a pitiful 60 bytes. You'd think they could at least cram 1K or 2K in there. Or sh*tcan some of the demo mode and use that space as user memory. The scroll routine probably resides on an epoxy blob ROM, rather than as a mess of linear gates, buffers, and other discrete ICs.

But for $15, it's still a hell of a deal.

I owe a debt of gratitude to JCB who had this neat gizmo sent to me. Thanks!!

My next trip will be to the local Radio Shack for a 6VDC wall wart. I have a feeling this is one device that will see a lot of "on" time.

 

[Graham]

Wow...that's amazing, for $15. Quite a bargain.

Craig, are you going to mount it on your scooter?

Graham

 

[stump]

I bought one and the wife loved it so much she bought one. It calls for a 6 volt 100 ma. wall-wart. I used a universal one, from Wally-world, which puts out 300 ma at 6 volts. With this thing drawing under 100 ma, the voltage was well over 6 volts. It's apparently voltage-sensitive and shuts down within a minute. The 4.5 volt setting on the "wart" puts out about 5.5 volts with this thing as a load and it works fine.
The moral of the story is, sneak up on the voltage.