Two pakcages in one day

Two packages arrived today. One in the morning and one in the afternoon. Yeah, it made my day.

This is a very big bag. If you have bought chickens from
Ayamas, you know how 'big' the bag is.

At first, I forgot what it was as sometimes, eBay
sellers really do protect the goods when they do
send them by post.

But its not eBay this time, but from China. As soon
as I paid them, they sent this LED badge to me. And
this was delivered within 5 days. I could have gotten
it cheaper but I did not know about AliExpress. Not
only that, because I 'bought' a sample, they had to
charge me a 'sample' price. Unfortunately, I could
not let them 'sample' my money.

The LED badge is quite small and in specifically chose
this size for a reason. Anyway, this is what came in
the box; the Badge, the CD and the USB cable.

They used very strong magnets instead of safety
pins to attach it to your clothes. Let me show you...

Aw, crap. It was so strong, the metal piece came off
with one pull. Then again, the glue was not that strong
anyway. The instructions said to plug this to the USB
port for at least two hours (with the display off) to get
the batteries charged up for a 16 hour use.

I better not lose this cable as I am not sure if
I can replace the USB connector.

I chose the smallest display, which is 7 rows of LEDs
by 23 columns. Unfortunately, the sample was RED
LEDs although I wanted White. But it was all that
they had. As a sample, of course.

These SMD LEDs are very small, and are used
mostly for Mobile phones and other applications

What is so amazing is that they managed to cram
a Lithium Polymer (LiPo) battery in there too.

Overall thickness (without the rubber coated casing)
was 7mm. I'm impressed!

There are four levels of brightness and different
types of scrolling and speed, all programmed by
the software. Unfortunately, the software does
not 'remember' your last setting so if you do not
want to erase your old text, do not overwrite it.
This version can hold up to three 152 character
text and 5 23-frame bitmap animation. The
software even came with a basic paint program
for you to make your own animation.

A lot of possibilities came to mind, especially
the Boba Fett chest display but it did not
work out the way I wanted it, though. So
I just created a new screen with tracing
paper. Of course you can do different
templates like LCARS but with RED
LEDs here, I was not enthusiastic.
Then of course, there was the idea
of using it for a Blade Runner Blimp

Anyway, this is how it looked like when I
finished. The tracing paper, in this case,
made the LEDs more pronounced and
well, better. To me, that is.

Its so easy to operate this with just three buttons.

Even Kaelynn got the hang of it after I showed
it to her for the first time.

The afternoon package arrived minutes before I came down to the reception. I wanted to get a few as test and they came in lots of 50. And do you know what it is?

It came in a normal padded envelope so this
means the item is very thin.

Yep. Its a set of LEDs from eBay, rectangular
2mm x 5mm x 7mm LEds to be exact.

One of them is orange and the other is white. I
had to use my Nokia 5800's flash to counter the
White LED's brightness (15000mcd) in order to
take this photo. Its amazing that the LED is so
bright even with 20mA current.