Building Your Own Glowing Cyber-Balls?

Posted by Cliff on Monday March 17, 2003 @05:02PM from the fun-DIY-projects dept.

krezel asks: "So I've been drooling over the Ambient Orb, a cool little gadget 'glowing ball' that you changes colors based the 'health' of things you specify. It can do stuff like fade from red to yellow to green as your stock portfolio improves. However, being a poor college student I can't afford its $200 price tag. I've found lots of sources for super bright multi-color LED's. Cast a couple of them in some translucent resin, hook them up to a power source, and you've got yourself a cheap glowing ball. But I've yet to find any good information on how to build hardware that will let me control relays for devices like this through my serial or parallel port. Basically I'm looking for a cheap way to build a board that will let me control 4-8 relays (for each color) over my serial port, and some info on how to write the software for it. This could be a very cool project, and I plan on making the plans available, and the code Open Source, when I'm done with it. Any ideas?"

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Re:parallel vs. serial by Grab · 2003-03-17 22:55 · Score: 0, Flamebait

I have to agree with you. Why the hell was this posted on /. when all the info could be found by Krezel getting off his ass and searching Google?

At the very least, there are *many* electronics forums around where he could ask the same question and be sure of finding ppl who know about electronics, instead of /. where only a small minority know more about hardware than how to bolt boards together.

Grab.