I got the finished printed circuit boards for the mystery device in the mail the other day. After putting all of the parts on the board, this is what I now have:

Keep in mind that this is just a prototype. The next version will be cooler.

Some features:

• Infrared remote control
• Serial port for computer control
• Ability to press the top of the lamp to turn it on/off or change modes (not in prototype)
• The color can be independently controlled at each corner
• Smooth, beautiful color transitions

One cool thing I did with the prototype was set it up to display a visual representation of the load average on my computer. I wrote a simple program on my mac which would translate the load average into a color, and then send a command over a serial port to change the color of the lamp. This is really fun—whenever I start a compile, the lamp slowly transitions from blue to green, to yellow, to orange, and then to red. When the compile is done, it fades back to blue. Completely pointless, but very fun.

Here are some more pictures:

This is what the NEW circuit board layout is going to be: