How Mobile apps, 3D printing, and Raspberry Pi are changing holiday lighting

This Christmas, get ready for lights that you can completely control with your cellphone, use your 3D printer to print bulbs for, and hook up to your Raspberry Pi.

 
 Lumenplay uses LED technology and each light can last about 20,000 hours.

Rigado, a product development company based in Oregon, recently introduced Lumenplay lights, which give users personalized control over colors and special effects.

Using a mobile app that works with all Android and iOS device, as well as Windows and Apple computers, you can pick from millions of colors, control the brightness, direction, speed, and pattern effects on your strand of lights.

 
Features of the Lumenplay mobile app.

You don’t have to settle for your ordinary, and possibly dull, strand of lights that just light up. Lumenplay offers features that you can incorporate into family games. They offer a “color picker” feature that you can substitute for game pieces in such games as Candyland, Twister, or Cranium, and a timer feature that can replace your traditional sand timer in games like Charades.

And if you don’t feel like taking your lights down, you can leave them up all year round and customize them for other holidays, such as red, white, and blue for the 4th of July or green for St. Patrick’s Day, or customize them for a romantic evening.

Raspberry Pi and 3D printing

Rigado plans to kick it up a notch by releasing software and code that allows users to address each light individually. So a user can upload a comma separated value file with each pixel defined by its HTML color code or even turn a building into a giant interactive Tetris game.

And if customizable software doesn’t get you excited, the company will also be creating a snap-on bulb feature so you can use your 3D printer to create your own bulbs for your lights.

Cost-efficient

Besides having some cool features, Lumenplay lights are pretty cost efficient, too. According to Rigado, a standard incandescent strand of lights, plugged in for six hours a day for three months, would have an energy cost of $13, but the same Lumenplay strand, under the same conditions would cost under a dollar.

When can I get some lights?

Controlling the Lumenplay Lights with your phone.

The company hopes to deliver the Lumenplay lights by the 2013 holiday season through a crowdfunding campaign that launched last Wednesday. In order to place a minimum order with their factory, the Lumenplay team needs to raise $159,025 by August 15.

An initial 10-foot Lumenplay light strand will cost $54 and $25 for each additional 20 feet, but the company is also offering starter and combo kits.

Learn more about Lumenplay.