homebrew ambient orb?

Factual Questions
1

Hi, all. I’d like to build something like an Ambient Orb (www.ambientdevices.com). Essentially, it’s an orb that can shift between different shades of light on display to indicate changes in stock prices, weather, and so on - a “crystal ball” that gets its information from a national wireless network.

It’s pretty cool - but its also ludicrously expensive, and it doesn’t connect directly to your computer. What I’d like to do is essentially build an array of multicolored LEDs that could be mounted in a frosted glass globe, like the Orb, and controlled by my computer. The PC would download information from Israeli news sites regularly, and - since I’m doing an independent study on Israel right now - probably search the headlines for words like “bomb” and a number - that number in the headline would probably be the number dead or the number of bombings. Either way, I could build an ambient orb that would change color based on how bad things are in the Middle East - for me, that would be both useful and cool in a macabre sort of way.

So. Questions. Is there a fairly simple controller board I can buy that I could plug my LEDs into and connect to my computer? Or would I have to build my own board from scratch? How many LEDs, and in what configuration, will I need to get a variety of colors that can approximate that from the read Ambient Orb?

I run linux, so I thought I’d use a shell script running on a cron job to run wget (download the articles), some search program or other to find the appropriate text, and then send that data to the rest of the batch file which would then control the orb based on what data was found? Is it doable in this way? I’d really prefer standing on the shoulders of giants to reinventing my own solution here.

Finally - no, I am not going to sell this, or claim its a real Ambient Orb, or do anything that would be against the interests of the nice folks at Ambient Devices. I just want a fun homebrew project, and I think the Dopers may like this as a “thought experiment” as well.

2

I’d kind of like to know this too. Surely somone out there has ripped these things off by now.

3

[bump] because this sounds awesome and I would love to have a whole shelf full of these things.

4

If I were going to build one of these, I’d use a Rabbit Semiconductor module, or something similar, and a handful of multicolor ultrabrights. I expect the whole thing should be under $50 in parts, and would be a fun project to build. And that’s for a stand-alone system; I suspect one driven by a pre-existing PC would be much cheaper to make, if less elegant.

Probably part of the cost of the Ambient Orb is for the dedicated server the company’s probably got to provide data to them.

5

Could you use the parallel port on your computer to provide signals to latches that feed transistors that power a collection of LEDs? Every last bit of that stuff can be had at RadioShack, just get a TTL logic cookbook while there. Does Radio shack still sell those little experimenter notebooks?

6

Oh, and here’s a link to someone who wrote a linux C library to control parallel port pins: link

He cautions that one should use an ISA parallel port as you don’t want to fry you motherboards port. I suspect a USB parallel port would work as well.