The big obstacle to setting up a new Pinscape system is that the retail microcontroller board that it's based on - the FRDM-KL25Z - is hard to find these days. It seems that it was an early victim of the post-COVID semiconductor shortage. All of the major distributors (Mouser, Digikey, Newark) sold out of their inventory around 2020-2021, and it's been really hard to find them since. You can still find them on Amazon and eBay, sporadically, and often at ridiculous scalper-level markups. NXP (the manufacturer) still shows it as an activate part on their web site, so *maybe* they'll do another run of them someday, but they make no promises to that effect. I actually just checked the NXP site...
https://www.nxp.com/...mcus:FRDM-KL25Z
moments ago, to double-check that the part is still showing active status, and I notice that they claim to have 63 in stock right now, at $19.25. (Inflated a bit from the old $15 list price, but it's not eBay scalper prices.) So if anyone wants one, this might be a good time to act. Newark also has 4 in stock right now at $26.90.
The other, somewhat lesser, blocker is one of the chips used in my Expansion Board design, TI's TLC5940NT. The through-hole DIP version of that chip that I used on my boards has been out of production for many years, and while they were still fairly easy to find for a lot of that time, they also have become difficult to source lately. You can still readily find them on eBay, but lots of people have reported problems with DOA chips or fraudulent sellers. This is less of a show-stopper than the KL25Z because (a) you can still find them if you're persistent enough, and (b) there are some alternatives. TI still makes two surface-mount versions of the part, which don't fit my board designs directly, but which can be made to fit with adapter boards. And it would also be possible to rework the board designs to replace the DIP version with the surface-mount equivalents - all of the chip versions are electronically identical, so the only changes required are to the physical layout of the area where the chip mounts. I'm not sure if I'll ever get around to it (I have too many other things on my to-do list ahead of it), but the designs are all open-source, so anyone with a little motivation could do that work.
As to "what is the 'status' of Pinscape", the software portion, the status is and will forever be that it's an open-source project that you can do with as you wish. It's essentially not an operative concept for it to someday go out of production like a microcontroller board or IC chip can, because everything about it is published on the web, and can even be freely re-published and propagated if the main sites where I "officially" distribute my work (such as github) should ever close down. I make no promises that I'll be available forever to personally respond to support requests, but one of the upsides/downsides of open source is that it doesn't matter whether or not I personally respond to support requests. Everything's published and free to use and modify, so anyone can take the initiative to fix things that need to be fixed or add things that they want added, even if I'm not available or willing.
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