Ladyada is showing off a new project called Adalight, which uses an Arduino board and a strip of RGB LEDs around the back of your display to create an ambient color backdrop for your computer monitor. The system automatically detects the average colors around the perimeter of your display, and immediately responds with the appropriate LED color in the proper section of the LED strip. Since it works as a high-speed screen capture utility in the background, it works with pretty much any application on your computer.

Open source software using the Processing library runs on your PC, Mac or Linux and interfaces with the Arduino over USB, and sends the correct light colors to each of the LEDs pixels. See the Adalight in action in the video below:

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Pretty cool, no? I suppose it could get to be a little annoying after a while, but it still might be pretty cool for 3D games and action movies. While you can build the Adalight from scratch, you can also purchase a project kit over at the MakerSHED for $49.95 (USD) to help you get started. The kit includes a strand of 25 RGB LED pixels and a 5VDC power adapter, but you will still need to purchase the Arduino and USB cable, and follow the rest of the build instructions to finish the project.

Each panel measures about 31.5″ square, and has an 8×8 grid of “smart” RGB LEDs. PixelInvaders LED panels use software called PixelController to drive them. You can even control them using a MIDI device or using OSC compatible software. The hardware is open-sourced, and is targeted at geeks, artists, and DIY enthusiasts. The panels themselves are able to playback real-time generated video or simple color changes. The PixelController software was released as open-source software on GitHub.

To support the project and get your own PixelInvaders LED panels, you can visit the IndieGoGo PixelInvaders page. Minimum contribution is $25, but to get anything back, you’ll need to give at least $282, and that only includes the LED modules. You’ll need to spend as much as $626 for all the parts needed to assemble a full panel, or $1499 for a fully assembled and tested one.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

You simply use the color selector bar like a color slider on your computer, picking the hue you’re looking for with a touch of your finger.

The little lights each have three 1-watt LEDs, and are powered by a built-in USB rechargeable battery. Battery life is rated at 6 hours on a full charge.

You wouldn’t want to try and read a book by these, but that’s not what they’re designed for. They look like they’d be great as accent lights in a darkened or dimly-lit room, though. The official brightness is spec’d at 150 lumens for each one, but they don’t look quite that bright to me. Still, they look pretty cool to me.

If you remember, a couple of years back Philips introduced their similar Livingcolors LED lights, which allow you to adjust to a color of your choice, but they still cost over $150 each. While these cheap clones might not be quite as stylish or as bright, they sell for just over $14 (USD) each over at Chinavasion, so you could fill a whole room with them on the cheap.

[via 7Gadgets]

Temperatures below 90°F make it turn green, temps between 91 and 105°F it becomes blue and 107 to 113°F will make it red. If it gets above 114°F, the shower head will start to flash, alerting you to the danger of potentially scalding yourself. These shower heads don’t require any batteries. There is an internal generator powered by the flow of water to charge it up.

You can get one for just $13 a pop here. That’s not a bad price for something like this.

[via Ubergizmo]

The clear acrylic LED cube features 64 RGB LEDs, wired together into a 4x4x4 grid, connected to a controller circuit. The cube has a trippy array of pre-programmed blinking, fading, and morphing color patterns which can run for over 30 minutes without repeating a design.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

The cube measures 5″ x 5″ x 6.5″ and comes with an AC adapter to keep it running. I think it would be really cool to set up a whole bunch of these in a dark room, and just sit there and chill out as the colors wash over you.

Want one? Head on over to ThinkGeek now, where you can get the Hi-Tec Art RGB LED cube for $99.99 (USD).

The point, of course, is teaching the physics of the additive color model. You know, red + green + blue = white, right? I’m not sure – but I’m hoping that I’m correct – but judging from the picture on the right, it seems that most of the light only comes out through the middle, meaning there’s barely any of the dizzying red, green and blue light on the fringe.

Ooops. Apparently it does create a murky rainbow of sorts.

[via Dailytonic via Moco Loco via inspire me, now! ]

Lucia is a sound reactive LED matrix, which consists of a 112×20 pixel RGB LED light box that can display a variety of shapes and colors, depending on the sounds it detects. It comes with a bunch of pre-loaded generative patterns and animations, which are controlled via a dial on the top of the display.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

I think it’s pretty cool, and I wouldn’t mind having one in my round as sort of ambient light source.

Of course, with the right programming, you could also use it as your own personal billboard, hawking your wares to  friends and family as they sit on your couch.

[via Designboom]

According to Sharp, their new 3D LCDs  will offer greater color saturation and depth than conventional 3-color LCDs. In addition, the new sets will feature technologies which are said to increase brightness by as much as 1.8 times over other 3D displays – which often lose brightness due to the polarizing shutters on their glasses.

To be more precise:

“The newly developed 3D LCD by Sharp offers a radical new solution… by combining four of Sharp’s unique, one-of-a-kind LCD technologies, including (1) UV2A technology, Sharp’s core technology for LCD TV panels, (2) four primary-color technology, (3) FRED technology, and (4) side-mount scanning LED backlight technology. This LCD is optimized for 3D TV, as screen brightness when displaying 3D images is 1.8 times higher than that of the conventional displays, and crosstalk is extremely low. Sharp’s four-primary-color technology utilizes four primary colors, adding Y (yellow) to the three conventional primary colors of R (red), G (green), and B (blue). This technology contributes to brighter, more vivid colors thanks to higher light transmission efficiency through the panel and a wider color gamut (range of colors that can be reproduced), which had been difficult to attain on conventional three primary color displays.”

Sounds good to me. Guess it’s time to throw my lowly 3-color 3DTV in the trash.

Initially, the sets will only be available in Japan, and you can check out more over on Sharp’s 3D technology website.

[Press Release (translated)]

The curvaceous lamp is loaded up with bright RGB LEDs that can change to any of 16 million unique colors and brightness levels through the use of a unique touch-panel interface. It actually works sort of like the color palette control you might find in photo-editing and painting software. Check out how it works in the video below:

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

In addition to fixed-colors, you can set the Jellyfish to a color flow mode with a variable fade speed between the colors of your choice. And you can switch off the front side illumination, leaving only the Jellyfish’s clear “tentacle” structure which provides a cool backlighting.

When powered off, the Jellyfish maintains a stealthy look, with a sleek black top and white bottom.

While I haven’t found any U.S. retailers for the Yantouch yet, the have numerous Taiwanese and Japanese retailers as well as an French retailer listed up on their website. Pricing in Japan is set at ¥14,800 (appx. $160 USD).

[Yantouch Jellyfish via Impress Watch (translated)]

Created by UK designers Aether & Hemera, the Mood Chair is like a Mood Ring for your ass. The chair is designed to change colors based on the user’s mood as well as the environment around them. Now how this hocus-pocus works, I dunno. A&H say it’s something to do with “LEDs, embedded micro-chips, and appropriate sensors”. Natch.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

No word on if or when you’ll be able to buy a Mood Chair for your own living room, but I’ll be the first to let you know when you can. While you wait, I’m gonna get to work on my Pet Rock chair.

[via Generate Pipeline]

Found hidden amongst the millions of items for sale over on eBay, Cyb3rBurn’s “Cyber Rave Goth Trance LED light-up Halloween Gas Mask” will definitely draw attention the next time you’re hanging out with your friends on the dance floor. And when the riot police show up and raid the place, perhaps you’ll have a few extra seconds of fresh air before the tear gas gets to you.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

And even if it doesn’t protect you from serious airborne threats, at least you’ll look cool while you’re gasping for your last breath. This oddity can be found over on Cyb3rburn’s eBay store for $39.99 (USD).

These brightly illuminated LED strips from LIT let you morph any piece of furniture into a colorful new canvas. Just secure the color-changing LED tube(s) to the bottom of your furniture, plug in to an outlet, and set them to the color you want. The included remote control lets you select your colors of choice, or program the LEDs to cycle through colors gradually or step through them one at a time.

The basic LIT Urban Underglow kit sells for $209.95 (USD) and includes a 37-inch RGB LED tube, mounting hardware, power supply and a wireless remote control for changing colors.  Additional tubes available in 37-inch ($87.95) and 19-inch ($74.95) segments, which can be joined together for larger installations. There’s even a rechargeable battery pack available for wireless installations ($64.95). They’re all available for order over at LIT.

And if you’re really willing to blow your budget, skip the cheap stuff and upgrade to a system powered by LIT’s amBIENT XC controller, which lets you synchronize the LED colors in your room to match the colors on a video source, thanks to amBX technology. Check out the video below to see that bad boy in action.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

The BlinkM from ThingM (I just love saying that) is a compact module that contains an ultra-bright RGB LED and a microcontroller that you can program from your computer.

You’ll need an Arduino I/O board to program your BlinkM, plus a 5-volt power supply to juice ‘em up. The ThingM guys have alread created a handy drum-machine-like sequencer application for Macs and PCs so you can easily program each one to any color, or to a color sequence of your choosing. There’s full 24-bit color control, and you can program up to 49 commands in sequence. And with a single two-wire network, you can connect up to 127 BlinkMs together to do you bidding. There are even 18 built-in light sequences, so even if you’re not that creative, you might already have one that does what you want.

There’s also source code available for you to do custom-programming to your heart’s content. Here’s a video of a couple of cool lighting effects ThinkM’s Tod Kurt put together using a bunch of BlinkMs:

BlinkM LED modules are available now over at the Adafruit store for $13 (USD) a piece. What’s the most creative thing you would do if you had a bunch of these modules? Me, I’d build an ultra-low res television.

[via Adafruit Blog]

These flat LED panels can be mounted on your wall or ceiling (although dancing on these isn’t recommended) and can change colors with the push of a button. Using the panels, you can set the color of your room to suit any mood. Especially if that mood is You should be dancin’, yeah!

Each colorful panel has an array of bright multi-color LEDs that can be switched between 16 different colors using the included wireless remote. The panels crank out 180 lumens of illumination, and in addition to solid colors, can be set to flash, strobe, or cross-fade between colors. Of course, to really achieve any real effect with these, you’ll need to buy a bunch – and in the case of the illustration below, you also need really bad taste.

In addition to wall and ceiling mounting, the panels can be used on the top of a table or on a bar as long as you place glass or plexiglas over the tops to protect them. If I had a bar, I’d totally cover the surface with these – then freeze the whole thing in ice.

These color-changing LED panels are available over at Chinavasion for $52.39 (USD) each.

The Joybee GP1 may have a silly name, but under the covers this tiny little projector means business. The compact projector measures in at just 5.35″ (w) x 2.24″ (H) x 4.72″ (D) and weighs only 1.4lbs. To put that in perspective, it’s about 2/3rds of the size of a Mac Mini.

And this isn’t one of those silly pocket projectors that can barely muster an image in a darkened room. The GP1 is powered by three bright PhlatLight LEDs and a Texas Instruments DLP panel (you know, the kind with millions of tiny mirrors). Contrast ratio is rated at 2000 to 1, but I don’t have the equipment on hand to prove how accurate that is or not. Regardless, when I checked out some test content, it looked as good or better than the contrast on my backlit LCD television, but not quite as good as my pricey SXRD display. Brightness is quoted at just 100 ANSI lumens, which certainly won’t win any contests, but is more than sufficient if you’re in a light-controlled environment.

Keep in mind that the on-screen photos below don’t really show you how good the picture looks – there’s nothing like taking photos in a dark room with no tripod.

The diminutive projector manages to crank out images from 15″ to 80″ diagonal, and while it works best in a darkened room – it can reasonably handle large images in a room with some ambient light. Here’s a 50″ image with the lights off and then on.

The Joybee’s native resolution is 858×600, which isn’t quite HD, but is plenty for playing video games, watching DVDs or doing business presentations. And speaking of video formats, the GP1 can handle most resolutions you can throw at it from 640×480 to 1280×1024 from your PC, and 480i/p, 576i/p, 720p and 1080i for other video sources. There’s a pretty good downscaling system for those higher resolutions, but you’ll always lose some information when you drop the resolution down lower than the source. At native resolution, the images are sharp as a tack.

In addition to being small, the GP1 offers the ability to be operated without a PC or other video source attached. That’s because it has a built-in multimedia playback system that can handle images and video files in a variety of formats through its USB reader. Out of the box, it can support XviD, MPEG-4 and MJPEG formats, as well as images in JPG, GIF, BMP and TIFF. BENQ also will be bundling a copy of ArcSoft MediaConverter to take your files and transcode them to the formats required by the projector. Keep in mind that the max video playback resolution off the USB reader is 720×480 at 30fps, which is slightly lower rez thatn the projector’s native pixels. Of course, you could always just hook up your laptop and play a DVD to skip all that rigamarole. Or better yet, just dock your iPod or iPhone, with the optional dock.

I did run into some decrease in brightness when playing content from the VGA port on my Dell laptop (images above), but given how bright the projector was with content on a USB flash drive, I think the issue was more likely something with the video output on my computer than the projector itself. That said, with VGA – YMMV.

The pint-sized projector also has a nifty feature that color corrects images based on wall color. I live in a house filled with colorful walls, so I decided to put this feature to the test. There are presets for a variety of wall colors, including blackboards.

Here’s a shot taken on a medium green wall in my media room with the correction set to “light green” (the whites sure looks white to me):

A few other niceties include auto keystone correction, a tripod socket for installing the projector when you don’t want to put it on a tabletop, and a built-in speaker (that won’t blow anyone’s eardrums). The projector also has advanced settings for flipping the image upside-down or backwards so you can ceiling mount or rear-project with it too.

But I think my favorite thing about the GP1 (besides its size, of course) is the fact that it starts up immediately with no wait time. Plus, the LED light source can run for 20,000 hours, which means you won’t ever be changing expensive light bulbs like you do with traditional projectors. It still generates a tiny bit of noise (28db) in order to keep those bright LEDs cool, but it’s way quieter than my Xbox 360 – or my PS3 for that matter.

Included in the box is a power pack that’s about the size of your average laptop charger, a compact remote control, and special CEA 30-pin video cable for connecting to VGA or composite video sources and analog stereo audio. There’s also little nylon carrying case that fits only the projector, but none of the accessories. There’s no component video cable included, but you can always pull component signals through the VGA connector with the proper adapter.

Unfortunately, there are no DVI or HDMI connectors. Hopefully BENQ will recognize this shortfall and come up with a 30-pin to HDMI cable in the future. I’m also not a big fan of the remote control – the keys aren’t in the most logical places, and I have a rule that any device that is operated with the lights off should have a backlit remote. On the plus side, it’s just an IR remote, so you can use any of the learning remotes out there if you’d prefer.

Overall, I’m impressed with this little projector. Subjectively speaking, Image quality is quite good for a device of its size, and I love the idea that you can use it without a PC if you want. Again, the biggest miss as far as I’m concerned is the lack of a digital input. HDMI is de riguer these days, and there’s no good excuse for not including an HDMI input on the GP1 – especially since it’s got built-in audio. Sure, the GP1 is never going to compete on brightness with larger units powered by traditional light sources, but for a impromptu gaming party or if you travel and do lots of business presentations, it’s great. I just love the idea that I can throw this little guy in my backpack, and set up a mini movie theater anywhere I go. It’s also a cool gadget for things like art video installations or in darkened environments like nightclubs, where you could load up a bunch of standalone units with video loaded onto a USB thumb drive and project some esoteric imagery.

The Joybee GP1 will be available from U.S. retailers (and direct from BENQ) on June 10, 2009, with an MSRP of $499 (USD). If you’re in the market for a compact projector, you’ll definitely want to check out the BENQ website for more details.

Crosswater’s RIO shower head is loaded with 96 computer-controlled LEDs in red, green and blue clusters so they can be mixed to create just about any color in the spectrum. Each one is focused to illuminate a powerful stream of water coming out of the 15-inch diameter shower head’s hundreds of needle-thin jets.

Now while this thing looks really cool, and I’d love to take a shower under one of these, I think I’ll have to pass for now. You see, the RIO retails for the insane price of £2799 (about $4454 USD). I could probably get a entire bathroom gut-remodeled for that much coin.

If you’d rather keep that money you’ve been saving for junior’s college fund, you could always grab this slightly less refined LED shower head over at ThinkGeek for just $49.99.

[via The Red Ferret Journal]

MonkeyLectric’s Monkey Lights snap onto the spokes of your bicycle and provide an amazing, colorful light show as you pedal through the streets at night.

You’ll have no problem being seen in the dark with a couple of these strapped to your wheels. Although you might end up causing an accident as drivers are mesmerized by the trippy kaleidoscopic patterns.

Each MonkeyLight is a self-contained circuit with 32 super-bright full color LEDs, and comes pre-programmed with thousands of dazzling lighting effects and patterns. Plus, MonkeyLectric offers a full schematic and instructions for installing your own applications, in case you want to hack in your own designs.

Just tie-wrap a Monkey Light board to each of your bike’s wheels, pop in 3 AA batteries, choose your lighting patterns, and watch it go as your wheels turn. The faster your tires spin, the cooler the effect.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

You can grab the Monkey Lights for $64.99 (USD) per wheel over at the MonkeyLectric store.

Perfect for lighting up your drab living space, these Léon and Max chairs from French designer Philippe Boulet light up using color-changing RGB LEDs inside the seats, backs, and armrests. And best of all, they’re not tacky in the least.

The clock comes with a wireless remote that lets you flip between a variety of different display modes, including traditional clocks, modern digitals, 3D animations, and even a Pac-Man mode. And with the optional upload module, you can load your own custom animations onto the clock face.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

The latest version of the clock offers a significant upgrade over the original 2-color version, adding a full RGB display and enhanced animation capabilities. It can even do real time math to convert square pixel graphics into the cartesian coordinates needed to display along the blade’s circular path.

The RGB POV Clock should be available from Innovative Device by the end of the year.

With a colorful 8×8 RGB LED display, the Meggy Jr RGB handheld platform gives you everything you need to create your own mini-games or pixel art displays.

Each colored dot actually contains three tiny LEDs, for a total of 192 uniquely addressable positions. The kit includes 6 clicky button switches, an audio transducer and additional LEDs for keeping track of things like your score or number of lives left in your custom games.

Meggy Jr even offers customizable handles so you can pimp out your handheld with your own design.

The Arduino-based Meggy Jr RGB kit comes with a pre-installed game called “Attack of the Cherry Tomatoes”, a little side-scrolling shooter, but the real fun comes from writing your own games. All you need is a USB-TTL cable, and the open-source Meggy Arduino developer library.

You can get your hands on Meggy Jr. over at Evil Mad Science with prices ranging from $65 to $95 USD.

[Meggy Jr. RGB Details]