I'm am working to setup a quick beta for the Aether and will need to get the coop moving as some of the parts are not stock in large enough quanititys so there will be wait time on them.
A few things to be aware of,
There will be only one coop this year for the Aether and this will be based on enough quanity to hit a price break worth the effort for the coop manager.
Do to a number of reasons including part cost in one quanitities and the dead requirement of no subisitute parts for the project the Aether will not be offered as a PCB only option at anytime as far out as I can see. There will be no extra pcbs ordered only enough for the coop kits.
I have posted 4 build videos for everyone to see what is involved in building an Aether. It is easily within the ability of anyone wanting to.
The coop will be under $100 for the kit. How much under I can not say yet but low end would be in the $85 range. This will build a flood light thats capabilites I have not seen matched for under $500 - $600.
Do not confuse this with the $40 and $50 options which are just leds on a board that you supply the power supply and controller. This is a complete self contained unit that includes the power supply and controller. It does not use cheap chinese leds, it uses top of the line high performance leds with much higher power, more light per watt and much better reliabilty. It uses constant current to drive the leds to insure maximum output with maximum life of the led.
The output of this flood is far beyond there abilities.
It has built in temp monitoring of the leds to insure you can never do anything dumb with the unit and over heat it. The unit will limit output if needed all the way to shutting it off to keep the temps in the optimum range. While it is highly unlikely you would operate it in conditions requiring it I wanted it bullet proof.
The light runs off of 120v AC (240v AC with a mod) or 24 v DC (DC only).
It operates off of any DMX source including the wireless of which an EX/RX can be built in to it to make it a stand alone power only required device.
It has a manual feature that allows a toggle switch to be added to the back of the case to turn the light on maximum white output manually with no dmx only power supplied. This is handy for aimming while setting up or for using it as a worklight.
You can add lens to the unit to change the angle of the light throw to taylor it for you needs. These lens are cost effective and come in 30 deg, 15 deg and 6 deg.
I will be releasing firmware for it later that makes one of them act as a master to control any others attached to it and run stand alone color transistions for house, landscape, pool type lighting applications. These will only require power and a cat5 cable daisy chained between them to get the commands back and forth to the slaves. No computer will be needed to do this.
RJ
