LED Tiles You Can Snap Together, With No Wires, Like Kids’ Builder Sets

August 29, 2014 by Dave Haynes

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Hat tip to InAVate in the UK for turning me on to a new Finnish start-up that has a different take on LED display blocks.

Stramos does 10 cm by 10 cm (4″X4″) blcoks that are almost like ceramic tiles in terms of form. The Stramos Tiles are modular and just snap together, a bit like a kid’s builder toys might. There are no wires, but each has a power module, onboard intelligence and wireless connectivity.

The can be stacked and connected in any crazy configuration and one Tile acts as the master for the slave Tiles, telling them what to do and show based on where they are in the configurations. The tiles equate to 6 mm pixel pitch LED boards, which means they are decent for indoors but won’t be replacing a desktop monitor anytime soon.

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The Helsinki company is pitching itself on the pure innovation and flexibility of the displays, price point, and the lack of need for a PC, specialty controllers or third-party playback software. The Tiles work with a Stramos-built, cloud-based CMS that comes free. The computing power on each Tile is limited, at least in Gen 1, so the Tiles can do stills and motion graphics set up in the CMS. No video.

These are the technical bits:

Pretty neat stuff. LED got thin and interesting with Nanolumens, and now we’re seeing a few companies getting into interesting LED tile products, like Christie with its new high-rez Velvet titles.

I like this primarily because of the shape possibilities that would go way outside the predictable boxes and rectangles.

I had a quick chat about market plans and price with co-founder/CEO Naba Kumar, who said after 2 years of R&D they are about ready for market launch and plan top show at ISE in Amsterdam in the new year. The target price is about 7500 Euro a square metre, which is roughly 100 of those Tiles. So 75 EU a Tile, I suppose, not that anyone’s buying one.

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