Thanks for the ping! I had 100 shields manufactured, and got samples of 10 (the rest are in China). I found the JST cable supplier reversed the polarity on the connector, so the 90 still in China had to get reworked, but other than that I’m pretty happy with how the shields turned out.
The project has been stalled for a while as I’m working on a test fixture. Normally the test fixtures I’ve built have been hand wired, fragile, and are very product-specific in both hardware and software. Inspired by this post and the fact that there are about 64 test points on the APA102 shield (that I have no desire to hand wire), I started working on a reusable test fixture design. Right now it consists of an Arduino Uno shield with 64 GPIO and ADC inputs (96 in the future), custom adapter for the APA102 shield, and an Arduino shield-shaped board to hold pogo pin receptacles. By the end of this next week I will have put more hours into this test fixture design than into the APA102 shield and APA102 SmartMatrix Library modifications.
I’m flying to China in early November - for a few reasons, not just to work on the APA102 shield - and I plan to bring my test fixture, get all 90 shields tested, and if I’m lucky, find a company in China who can do worldwide fulfillment of the shields affordably. When the shields are available I’ll post a link here first.
I don’t plan on finalizing the SmartMatrix Library with APA102 support until the “Libraries v2.0” details get worked out. I want to be able to have a single release that supports both Teensy and Photon. @peekay123 do you have any insight into when that might be?