Check out this wet and wild spring break story. Actually, Nate True spent his break hacking a tap light to make it emulate an Ambient Orb. It is wireless and you have full control over the color. You could have it indicate almost anything: new mail, rss feed activity, cpu temperature. It isn’t a perfect copy of the orb: it is $100 dollars cheaper and you don’t have to pay any monthly fees. I guess that just means you’ll have more money left over to throw at other executoys, or you could save it and take a real trip next year.
Mmmmm, various orbs…
sweet…i have to ues one of those lights in my car cause my bro punched the regular cab light…does this mean i can make it change colors with my wireless laptop? ^_^
i love this orb stuff, im glad i found the hack, im planning on putting one inside a mouse, so that glows under your hand
Does that sound unique enough? Color-changing, wireless floating walnut?
Awesome.
This’d be cool with a CCFL in a computer case… Or maybe put it in a fish tank
I remember this from a few years ago when the ambient orb first came out. Here is the slashdot post from back then:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/04/08/2332216&tid=167
I was doing something like this with an 8051 uC for transplantation into a mouse. It has been abandoned since I have gone to a bluetooth mouse (no easy way to get control through to it, plus would be a drain on the battery). I was also thinking about doing it to a keyboard. Have each key respon to a keypress, flash randomly, etc. This article did help my design ideas though, I never thought of using a shift-register and a 555 chip, I did everything in software on the uC.