I’m headed on vacation for the holiday and won’t be back until the end of November. Since I have no Black Friday deal to offer, I’m offering an 11-11 special as a going away present.

Special A: Primer Final (well, for a month or so)

Here’s Primer 0.6 - now with Pocket Protection for all of you tired of drained batteries from light turning on by accident in your pocket or bag. It also has a completely overhauled serial communication system that enabled it to seamlessly and quickly communicate with a graphical front end that allows you to design your own 31 color palette, 16 2x16 color presets with 48 different strobe patterns to chose from and design 4x16 slot preset playlists to cycle through.

It has a lot packed into it. So I’ve created a video to explain the various features. For all the details, you should refer to Primer’s home here on this site.

Special B: Tekton Complete (until that next Primer update, at least)

So I mentioned all those customizable things but doing it on chip (and 10 chips at that!) can be a drag. Also, how do you share? There’s a Mode Swap for every microlight and they all have to manually type out their color combos and strobe pattern presets and you have to manually transcribe that into your light through an arcane UI. I think my on-chip customization beats all in the same class, but in spite of that, I still hate doing it for 1 mode on 10 lights. Doing it on 16? You’ve got to be joking.

I mentioned in the initial announcement of Tekton that Gregory Roberts’s Slider Pro was a huge inspiration. I used the overall design as a guide on how I wanted to structure Tekton from the ground up and am excited to work further with him on including all of the missing features from Slider Pro and more.

Tekton is second app behind Slider Pro to offer control of a microlight through a computer and is now included with the packaged and source distributions of Primer. It is cross-platform and allows you configure all aspects of your light from a Mac, Windows, or Linux computer. Its simple to use interface is demonstrated below. Note that the preset editor demo is of the initial release and is slightly out of date. The functionality of the preset editor remains unchanged, but there are 2 additional interfaces for palette and bundle customization that are demonstrated in the second video as well as full-light backup and loading.

Save, Load, Share

So download, create, share. Now you can make your own set of colors and send it to your friends for those double-team shows. Now you can sync your colors and your presets, or share the framework and mutate as desired to have a unique flair but a shared base. The possibilities are open now that your lights are. I hope you enjoy my creations and have a great Thanksgiving. Enjoy a stable Primer while it lasts :-)