TRIKLITS Smart LEDs In Programmable Status Board

TRIKLITS, you may remember, are rope-lights with a difference – each of the 24 points on each strand has two LEDs, and the whole thing is individually controllable via a USB or serial interface card.  You could say they're the fairy-lights of the 21st century, if you were prone to making crass comparative statements like that.  Anyway, one of the great things about them, now that they're on sale, is that they can be used out of context for lots of interesting projects; a good example of this is Sean O'Steen's Programmable Status Board.

Sean is a programmer working on a variety of servers, software builds and databases, and wanted an easy, one-glance way of seeing the status of everything.  With two lengths of TRIKLITS, a USB interface kit and some Perl scripts, he fashioned a board almost 38 by 20-inches with twenty-four different, individually addressable enclosures.  Now, if something goes wrong, a change to red means he knows about it asap.

Photos of the innards after the break.

It would be interesting to see one of these that showed IM contact status, newly arrived emails from specific people or accounts, and VOIP voicemails – the perfect noticeboard for the modern family!

Geekularity [via MAKE:]