Building Your Own Glowing Cyber-Balls?

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?"

Comments

Blue Balls

[l810c]

Mine glow Blue when they lack a certain something...

This has been done many times before.

[Chris_Stankowitz]

My "Friend" had his done in Tiawana for 20$. He swears if he ever find that girl she will pay!! but I digress...I mean my "friend"....

Re:...Glowing balls?

[Anonymous Coward]

wooohooo, let's bomb those bastards!!

France? Are the Germans invading *again*?

[Anonymous Coward]

Lord knows they're due. It's been 60+ years since they last kicked the French's ass, and as current events show, the French certainly need it about now.

And why the hell does France have a permanent seat on the UN Security Council? What was that, some sort of consolation prize for getting their asses kicked in every war since the Russians kicked the shit out of Napoleon in 1810 or so?