Light - an advanced lamp with Linux on board

On October 22, kickstarter started fundraising for the project “Light” - an advanced linux lamp. It is a matte plastic cube, inside which there are 52 RGB LEDs on the edges, controlled by a microcomputer with an accelerometer and a wireless module, which opens up great opportunities for using this device: it can be used as an unusual fixture and as an indicator (for example, system resources on the server), and as an alarm clock, or ambilight.

One of the goals of this project is to create a development platform that is accessible not only to experienced system programmers. Since a REST interface is used to control the device, it does not matter what language the application was written in and whether it runs on Light itself, or somewhere on the other side of the Earth.

The project is completely open, the source code of the software can be viewed on the project page on github, and the process of creation, instructions and specifications of "Iron" in
developer blog .
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Software part

OS	Arch Linux ( ARM )
Core	2.6.x (possible, 3.7 when it goes to the series)
Development tools	GNU toolchain, Python 2.7
Animation	WuVoxels, Sing , editor Moore'sCloud Studio
Control	Moore'sCloud Control (web interface), sshd
Other	all packages available from ArchLinux repositories

All libraries and software are open source and are available on github , and development news is regularly updated on the blog .

Hardware

Dimensions	150mm x 150mm x 135mm
Nutrition	5VDC, 3A
Light source	52 RGB LEDs (7 bits for each color): 9 on the outer edges (3x3) 4 on the inner edges (2x2)
CPU	Freescale iMX233 @ 454 Mhz
Ram	64MB DDR SDRAM
External memory	2GB microSD
Accelerometer	Freescale MMA7660
Radio module	WiFi Nano USB 802.11 b / g / n (replaceable)
miscellanea	I2C to connect their devices and serial terminal

In total, the project creators tested three microcomputers:

• Raspberry PI - its advantages were the cheapness of having a good Linux distribution and documentation for working with LED strips
• Olimex OLinuXino Maxi and Micro, which are also cheap, but distributed with an open license for hardware and work well with linux

As the developers themselves say,

This is a full-fledged Linux computer that manages a pack of LEDs
The unit includes a fully functional ARM based Linux computer

Additional Information

• Project project on kickstarter
• Blog developers with news, pictures and examples
• Project profile on github
• Moore's Cloud - a company that develops Light