Using Christmas Lights to See the Chat Statuses of IM Contacts

Because directing your eyes to a different part of the screen is just not cool enough for geeks: Andrej Kyselica has hacked together an interface that uses a FEZ Panda board hooked up to a string of Christmas lights to display which people among 35 different IM contacts are online and available for chat. The lights change colors according to the statuses of said contacts: Green is available, red is busy, and yellow is idle, and purple can be manually set to correspond to out-of-office.

Video demo below:

Driver code is available here, and Kyselica says source is coming soon.

(TinyCLR via Download Squad via Hack a Day)