The only hardware solution that turns any iPad into a true, wireless second display.
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
We’ve been working nonstop to get Luna ready for production with our manufacturing partners — we’ll have a more detailed update for you in January! In the meantime, we want to make a shout out to our friends at Minut who are just wrapping up their own successful Kickstarter!
Minut is a longtime friend of Astro HQ and was a critical partner in the early stages of Luna. We rarely use our community to promote products, but we encourage you to check out their Kickstarter and read our story below about how Luna came to life with the help of Minut’s team!
Meet Point, a complete home alarm in a single device with no invasive cameras:
Luna’s journey began in the summer of 2006 with a couple of engineering interns at Apple. Matt and Giovanni (our Astro HQ cofounders, the company behind Luna) shared a dorm room on the Apple campus, and were friends with Nils (Minut’s cofounder) who lived just down the hall.
After years of working full-time at Apple, Nils moved back to Sweden to start his hardware company Minut, successfully launching his product Point on Kickstarter. Around the same time, Giovanni and his old roommate Matt reconnected to launch Astropad under their new company Astro HQ.
Not long after launching Astropad, Giovanni already had another product idea. While Astropad turns the iPad into a mirroring graphics tablet for Mac, he wondered if he could use the iPad as a remote display. Using Astropad’s underlying Liquid Engine technology, it could be possible to turn your iPad into a portable and wireless second display. The only catch was that it would require a hardware component in order to fully access the Mac’s graphics card.
Just before the holidays in 2015, Giovanni called up his old friend Nils with the hope of getting some feedback on his new idea. Right away, Nils envisioned the potential for the product and offered to help with the initial prototyping. Within a month, he had enlisted his team of engineers at Minut to help Astro HQ build the first prototype of Luna Display.
In the spring of 2016, Matt and Giovanni traveled to Sweden to meet Minut’s hardware team and to see the progress of Luna first hand!
Combining Minut’s prototype with our own Liquid Engine proved that Luna could be more than just an idea. Not only did it pass the feasibility test, but it was clear that Luna had true potential as a product.
But we also learned through working with Minut that building a finished Luna was going to be a complex journey with many hurdles ahead. In order to take Luna beyond Minut’s lab and turn it into a reality, we’d have to devote an an entire team to get Luna ready for manufacturing.
Bringing the initial Luna prototype to life was a huge discovery period for everyone. As Giovanni describes it: “we didn’t know the space, we entered a dark room, and Minut started turning lights on for us.”
Thank you to Minut for being an early part of our journey, and thank you to our Kickstarter community for your support along the way. And now, the adventure continues.
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
Our Kickstarter campaign finally came to a close yesterday. To everyone who backed Luna, helped spread the word, and believed in us from the beginning — we are so grateful for you!
Now it’s time for us to shift our focus to manufacturing. It’s our top priority to get Luna shipped out on time to our backers. We’re surrounding our team with world-class manufacturing and distribution partners to make sure that Luna is built and delivered to you with the best quality.
Yesterday, Luna Display’s co-founder Giovanni left for China. During his time overseas, he’ll be visiting our factory floor in Guangzhou and meeting with our manufacturing and quality control team.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be sending out a survey to all of our Kickstarter backers. At that time, you’ll be able to choose your preference for a USB-C or Mini DisplayPort Luna unit.
If you ordered the Artist Bundle, you can choose when you’d like to activate your subscription for Astropad Studio. You’ll have the option of starting it immediately or when your Luna ships.
Please consider spreading the word about Luna Display:
Since our campaign launched back in August, we've been overwhelmed by the support of our Kickstarter community. It's given us extra confidence to strive to make Luna even better — so we're excited to debut a new feature in Luna called the Camera Button.
When using Luna, tap the iPad's front-facing camera to bring out a simple interface to adjust screen brightness, display arrangement, and more. These are features you will use all the time when using Luna and they will be right at your fingertips.
Turning the camera into a reliably functioning button didn’t come without challenges. In total, we spent four months of continuous engineering efforts to get past these hurdles:
Variable Lighting
The Camera Button works by detecting the amount of light coming in through the camera. Covering up the camera with your finger blocks all light, triggering a response from the iPad. The tricky part was getting it to work in all lighting conditions, across all iPad cameras.
To test how the camera behaves in different lighting conditions, we built a makeshift light box. By manipulating the lighting, we were able to engineer the camera button to work predictably despite the brightness of the room. We even tested variances in finger pressure — how hard or lightly you tap the camera. The finger contraption in the below photo has an adjustment screw that controls how far the finger was depressed on the iPad camera.
Energy Efficiency
In order for the Camera Button to work, the camera needs to be constantly processing while using the app. So we made it a design goal from the beginning to ensure that it doesn’t affect battery life. This meant writing very efficient code based on algorithms that prioritized energy efficiency. After the code was written, we optimized it meticulously to eliminate any bottlenecks. Today, the Camera Button requires less than 1% CPU to run.
User Privacy
Maintaining user privacy is critical, and that meant finding ways to anonymize data coming in from the camera. The solution: blur the camera images to the point of not being able to see any data coming in, so the only thing the camera registers is the amount of light coming in. Additionally, data coming in through the camera never leaves the iPad and is never sent to a server. Even though using the Camera Button is an optional setting in Luna, we understand that some users may not be comfortable with this feature. That’s why we also programmed the iPad volume buttons to have the same functionality as the Camera Button.
To learn more about how we built the Camera Button, check out our full blog post.
With just three days left to go, we've been doing a lot of planning to ensure that Luna ships on time. We're headed to China immediately after our Kickstarter wraps up to meet with with our manufacturing partners. Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to bring Luna to life!
Please consider spreading the word about Luna Display: