Don’t start telling me that you pay for stuff on kickstarter because you feel you are supporting start ups.
Since then, they have also posted a picture of the full unit. Going back to the ELCO Lighting page, we find this. They don’t show any pictures of the full setup, but they do have this image on their Kickstarter of a corner of the controller. I don’t know why they call it a ballast, but what they really mean is the LED controller.
This masking of the “ELCO LIGHTING” text strongly suggests blatant deception on the creators’ part. Here, we find the exact same LED strip they are selling at the bottom (EWP1460-24M) of this page. This was done in photoshop to obscure the text “ELCO LIGHTING”. Note how there are two black marks on the strip. Let’s skip a bit past some research into wattage. The eBay strip has only 3 LEDs per cuttable segment rather than 6, but that is the only difference in the design. The curiously blacked-out “- Lighting” text?Ĭompare with from many of the eBay posts that come up with a search for “RGB LED strip”. Note a few things: The strip design, the LED type, the positioning of components. Posted in Crowd Funding Tagged ambiolight, Crowd Funding Post navigationĪ few things that the original Kickstarter post didn’t mention:Įxhibit A: The blacked-out ELCO Lighting LED strip. What say you, Hackaday reader? Is it right for the AmbioLight team to do this?ĮDIT: Kickstarter suspended the funding of AmbioLight a few hours after this was posted. Still, given the vitriol of the AmbioLight’s comments page, Kickstarter contributors don’t seem to appreciate taking an already available product and reselling it as your own. I’ve even contributed to Kickstarter campaigns just to get a difficult-to-source component. Comparing the picture of the ‘ballast’ on the AmbioLight Kickstarter to the ELCO controller raises even more suspicions about how involved the AmbioLight team was involved in the design of their product.Įven if the AmbioLight is simply a repackaging of an already existing product, that doesn’t make it against the rules of Kickstarter. Internet denizens are now frothing at the mouth, complaining the designers of the AmbioLight, “haven’t designed anything,” and are, “just reselling parts which put together at a higher cost than other products on the market.”Ī few backers of the AmbioLight have found what they think to be the original product, an RGB LED strip produced by ELCO Lighting. The only problem is that some of the backers discovered this RGB LED strip is already on the market. This Kickstarter campaign, the AmbioLight, brings RGB LED strips to the masses.