So I finally received my Gen 2 today and have some mixed feelings.
While it’s nowhere close to the advertisement in terms of sharpness/crispness, I also don’t see all the blurriness of some of the photos here. Sure it’s a bit blurry, pressing on the panel to move it closer to the LEDs does make it sharper and proves it could be better, but it’s still very tolerable the way it is. I don’t know, maybe I was lucky enough to get a “good” unit.
I took some photos of it but quite frankly it looks worse on them than in real life:
@candido just posted a couple of pictures in the thread… Thanks again, that worked great. No glare and the color seems to pop more now too. It is now simply diffused, and not the blurry out of focus look that I received. The original diffuser just didn’t get close enough to the LEDs. Mine had thick double sided foam like adhesive holding it on as well, pulling it even further away from the LEDs. So in hindsight, maybe a thinner grid and no double sided foam tape. I bet gen2 would have looked as it was intended to.
That’s awesome, I can’t wait to order my own diffuser for my Gen 1. I am glad it worked out for you. Did you put any adhesive to yours? I know you mentioned that Tidbyt officially used some and that caused issues for them.
Honestly, when I ordered my translucent acrylic that my Gen 1 currently has on I ordered perfectly to fit on the screen cutout. That way no adhesive is needed since it just fits and sits. Plus it helps that I have my tidbyt on a tilted stand, it keeps the acrylic in place and allows the acrylic to be as close as it can be to the LED.
By the way, what LED brightness level do you feel is the sweet spot with this diffuser acrylic on?
No adhesive, once I got it to size it fit in nice and snug, and I have it at 100 in the pic, I turned it down to 95 since then - very subtle difference.
But the key is to get it as close to the LED as possible.
This is the Adafruit acrylic. It is not machined. Need to figured out how and where to get it laser cut. However, I honestly preferred Adafruit’s. It is thinner and it lets more brighteness out and it is a tiny bit less black-tinted. It doesn’t look like it makes a difference through photo, but trust me that the Adafruit lets a brighter image through than the TAP Plastic acrylic. Pure white light just looks better through it. Looks truer white
I have to agree with most posts in this thread.
The product took a long long time to land at my front door… I was so underwhelmed when I opened and tested the unit out
It’s just a simple ‘nothing’ thing,
Tried several apps and attempted to adjust brightness / speed / random colours of the apps I did download (according to ‘options’ within each app… but nada. nothing changed on any option in any app.
Disappointing, mea culpa for backing it, but I think I’ll just stick it away in a drawer somewhere because it’s simply not something I would show off to friends to impress.
Pity. I’m just a consumer and hoped it would be fun - sadly it’s not.
To me it’s an overpriced ugly clock.
I bought 4 of the new gen 2 models through Kickstarter. One for me and the others for gifts. I strongly disagree with your suggestion that it is “optimized” for viewing from 3 feet or greater. Mine is 15 feet away directly infant of my dest - where I had my gen 1 and this new one is unreadable. On top of that it can’t hold the correct time. These are un giftable and not useable for me either. Please let me return the other unboxed units!!
