Moore'sCloud: Finally, a light with intelligence to match yours.

Moore'sCloud: Finally, a light with intelligence to match yours.(kickstarter.com)

21 points by mpesce 13 years ago | 30 comments

First thing I'd do is get this plugged into NZ weather feed and get it indicating the temperature for the day so my partner will stop nagging me "What's the temperature going to be today?".

I know you could probably just duct-tape an iPad to the wall or get a smart fridge or whatever but I like the idea of a lo-fi display that's part of the furniture, not too tech, always on, communicating by light rather than pixels.

abrown28 13 years ago |

I will never be rich. I don't understand why everyone likes this so much. It's a toy you will play with for a bit then forget you have.

TheZenPsycho 13 years ago | |

Much the same could be said of most electronics. Toys gadgets gizmos. This is hacker news so I wonder how this sentiment belongs here.

Nevertheless, there is a conceptual barrier here that is difficult to cross, and it has to do with the expectation here that a gadget or product should hold our attention, or in other words, to be a distraction, in order to be worth our time and money. The light however is not exactly the same sort of thing as a game console- it's aiming for a different kind of niche, the niche of ambient computing. A kind of gadget that you /don't/ notice, that doesn't hold your attention. A gadget you buy expecting to forget that it is there- because it is just quietly doing what it is supposed to: ambiently communicating. A mood, a temperature, a status. It's simple as that. As geeks we can hack on it and overcomplicate things, but the essence of this is simply: connect a light to the cloud.

kean 13 years ago | |

Unlike many gadgets people buy, I don't think this is one you would easily forget or put in a drawer. People use indoor lighting every evening, and this is much more than any old light. You just need to place it somewhere central, and decide what triggers (other than manual control) will change its illuminance/colours/patterns. Oh, and many basic decorator lamps at a lighting store are more expensive than this.

kerno 13 years ago |

I dunno guys I was just going to use mine as a night light. That's cool too right?

mrposty 13 years ago | |

We've backed for 2 battery powered ones, and plan on doing that, as well as an alarm clock that will integrate with our lifx backing.

that way the bathroom light can start at 20% when I touch the light when i get up and fade up over a few minutes to 100% while I hate the world a little less during that time in the morning when I get up.

I'm not a morning person.

shiftyphil 13 years ago | |

It can certainly do that; but it can do a lot more.

bsdpunk 13 years ago |

I swear I want enough of these to build a partition in my office, so when the arduino that senses the light from the door opening, suddenly I have a wall partition that says Go away in pixel art

purecaffeine 13 years ago | |

If you can afford to buy 96 of these Lights then I think you can get the project across the funding line single-handedly :)

bsdpunk 13 years ago | | |

alas I have only pledged for one...However, if I were to receive a Christmas Bonus....

ahiskens 13 years ago |

With kids deparrting to different corners of the earth, I'm thinking of using mine as a kind of co-presence monitor. Skype and talking is one thing, but something which simulates the sense of knowing that someone is in the next room, or at a certain stage in their daily routine would really anhance the sense of connectedness - even if its only a trick played ononeself ;)

KJGill 13 years ago |

This will be just the hook to encourage my teenaged son to ramp up his programming skills. He couldn't care less about writing computer games, which seems to be what all the "learn to code" books are aiming for, but he'd love to make something HAPPEN. Could you imagine what would happen if you let a roomful of high school kids have a go at these?

kayno 13 years ago |

The Light is going to complement my LIFX wireless bulbs perfectly. I plan on using a bedside Light as a switch for my LIFX bulbs - tap the Light, it begins to glow softly and instructs the LIFX bulbs between the bedroom and bathroom to also glow softly.

No more peeing on the seat in the dark!

TheZenPsycho 13 years ago |

So I have been working on an antialiased vector drawing library for the Light (called 'wuvoxels'). now the nice thing about the wuvoxel approach is that it can scale across multiple lights seamlessly- allowing software to be written that will work on a single light or across a whole room.

stryqx 13 years ago |

I'd like to get enough to replace my Christmas tree with a Light cluster, but I'll probably start with having one as a visual thermometer/barometer/weather gauge, then two/three for ambient night lighting and maybe one or two as network health visual indicators.

200ok 13 years ago |

It's such a neatly produced package, light+LAMP. I have some simple ideas for ambient monitoring and a power outage mode for the battery light... but mostly I think it would be amazing to see what a community around this would come up with!

sunpazed 13 years ago |

There are other similar projects, however the advantage of the Light is that it can exist as a client AND stand-alone server, controlling other lights - including other 'Internet-of-Things'

TimSAstro 13 years ago |

Here's an idea - link it to your performance monitoring software of choice, and have it colour-coded to show the usage of your cluster nodes in real time. How cool would that be?!

mrposty 13 years ago | |

pretty damn cool. It is the zombo.com of lights.

except it does... what... it is meant to...

ok maybe not zombo.com.

lachlanhardy 13 years ago |

I've backed it. I'm getting a couple, I'm thinking at least 3, to put into my local coworking space for people to hack on and come up with stuff I'd never think of.

kcarruthers 13 years ago |

I really want to have these all thru the house. Control of ambient light it one thing but this is even better. Millions of colours. All controlled from my iDevices.

snogglethorpe 13 years ago | |

Argh... pretty soon there will be places where one won't even be able to turn on the lights without a smartphone... ><

mrposty 13 years ago | | |

eh. it purportedly is going to have touch controls. so it could act as a switch of sorts if you wanted it to.

jodiem 13 years ago | |

Hey, I'm going to control them via my Android devices... It's multi platform, which is great :)

trib 13 years ago |

Backed, and have been helping with a little testing. It's a mighty cool device; I don't think we've scratched the surface of the possibilities yet.

Back it.

skaelight 13 years ago |

It is always good to see an innovative product; 'tis almost the essence of hacking, only in this case, hacking illumination.

jsblack 13 years ago |

This would be amazing for schools...Very cool. Can't wait to show the staff tomorrow.

madpilot 13 years ago |

I would love one of these for a build server indicator.

mrposty 13 years ago | |

backer here - there's also a nice video regarding working with atlassian to show when the build gets broken.

http://blog.moorescloud.com/2012/11/20/breaking-the-build-ag...

ohmslaw 13 years ago |

Light is good. I'm in.