Now that I have a driver to control these cool individually-controllable Christmas lights, I’m thinking of ways to use them. I had an idea this morning: can use each light to indicate the presense of someone on my IM contact list! We use Microsoft Lync at work for IM and Lync has a great SDK so it didn’t take long to wire it up.
The Panda runs a simple program that reads light commands via USB serial port and controls the lights accordingly. There’s a small program on the desktop that uses the Lync SDK to get status for each contact and subscribe to changes on presense and out-of-office status.
I’ll post my source code up soon… just need to extract the working pieces from the junk I have accumulated in this VS project file.
@ chris: I picked up the last set from my Lowes here in West Chester, OH on Saturday. They had one wall of normal lights and these were down the same aisle on the other side with bigger decorations like the stand-up figures.
