“very cute bit of sparkly fun. packaging and assembly easy. reprogramming or hacking this gadget to do other stuff looks very advanced. but for sparkly seasonal fun it's just what you want.”
“The Snowflake exceeded my expectations. The packaging was the first pleasant surprise, showing that it is also designed to be offered as a gift. Then the assembly was simple (thanks to the tutorial), with the boards popping out of the panel easily. The only challenge during that step was to find the correct alignment for inserting the cables into the "IN" and "OUT" connectors. Once that was done, I plugged in my USB power supply and everything worked on the first attempt.
As written in the product description, these tiny LEDs are surprisingly bright. I had to see them with my own eyes to believe that description and I was not disappointed. In addition, the built-in animations are really nice.
Now of course I would like to add my own animations. This is the only part of the Snowflake that could do with some improvements: although there are some pads on which I could solder a programming header, I am afraid of damaging the boards if I solder something on these tiny pads. I was hoping to find a custom connector in the "Extras" section, but that does not seem to exist (yet). So now I am thinking about designing and 3D printing a custom connector that could use some of the hollow parts of the boards as guides for positioning some spring-loaded contacts (pogo pins) precisely on top of the pads. That should be a fun project.”
“very beautiful, easy to assemble. just confused with the power supply, recommended by the site is 5V from the pi and in the source documentation it is 3V, but it works fine with the 5V”
“I bought this for my wife who is seriously ill at present. She absolutely loves the patterns and has asked for more for next year.
Putting the kit together was very simple, a matter of five minutes. The parts are very well constructed.”
“Easy to put together, and a clever little design. The only tricky part is getting the flat cables seated correctly. There are three positions where they seem to be in place - 1. Not actually in at all, 2. Just in - held by the clip but not really well, 3. Fully in place. Once there though it works well.
You can't however do anything interesting with it without buying extra parts. It has pads for the necessary header to program it, but no headers - not even as an optional extra. I'd welcome an add-on pack of the bits necessary so one can make the most of it.”
