I’ve always been interested in building things off the desk or off the computer in front of us; that’s why I love building mobile products. But I’ve always had a passion for visual display through lighting, so with that I’ve been working and revising lightpanel for the past year.

Lightpanel is a project I’m building that comprises of three LED (7 column, 9 rows) Phidget boards that are connected to a computer over USB and exposed over the network by a lightweight and fast Java server that accepts commands over socket connections. For example if I want to switch on row 2 and column 5 at 100% I just send the command “2 5 100” to the server over a standard socket session (telnet works great)

Here is my latest demo which is a snake simulation where the snake moves around the 3 boards with its tail decaying as it moves along. Because of the great framework I’m using on Java end I actually have 5 ruby clients running an instance of the snake resulting in a pretty crazy visualisation.



Source on Github.