Christmas lights are boring, predictable and highly prone to burning down the house — and not in the funky way. The Aussie team behind the Light by Moore’s Cloud has a new product that could change Christmas lights into everyday lights.
I was a big fan of the original Light concept; so much so that I put down my own money for the Kickstarter (which didn’t get up) and I’m part of the 20 per cent that’s part of the self-funding effort…. but that still isn’t enough. I live in hope.
So instead, the Moore’s Cloud team (you’d probably most instantly recognise Mark Pesce, if only for his appearances on The New Inventors) have unveiled a new product: Holiday lights in a string, called simply “Holiday”. Hang on, though… don’t we already have those every year around December?
Well, yes, but the technology behind Holiday is a little more than just some cheap wire and a transformer block. Fifty LED globes sit on a seven metre string with a central command console that runs the programmable side of the lights in the same fashion that the original Light did, backed up with smartphone apps to (theoretically) make selecting light patterns easy.
The hardware underneath is an iMX233 454 Mhz CPU running Arch Linux with a 2 GB microSD for storage. Critically for lights in sequence, the promise is that individual globes are easily replaceable. Full open software and hardware schematics will be released at a later date; it’s almost like Pesce’s some kind of tinkerer or something.
The idea is that instead of just stringing them up for December 25th, you’d have them strung all year and use them for parties, sporting events and so on. A set of Holiday lights will run to $129 at the moment (with a claimed RRP of $199, but it’s not clear how long the “introductory” price will last) with the first set of lights due to ship in November.
I find myself oddly not quite as tempted as I was by the Light, but I’d still be interested to give these a play; for what it’s worth they’re on display at CeBIT in Sydney right now (but I’m not).
Source: Moore’s Cloud