Anyone have any practical experience with these awesome chips? I've always wanted to play with one but today that deal was sealed and I'm about to order a few.

GE is hosting a tech-fair at the Museum so I was helping them test some stuff out today and they showed me this awesome setup:

They have a string of lights (think big christmas lights) hooked up to an Arduino, which is then hooked into a network controller and put on the network. They then use the Twitter API to search for tweets sent @IFAIR with a #color hashtag (e.g. #magenta, #blue). Those tweets are parsed and the appropriate color sent to the Arduino, at which point the string of lights changes colors! Was pretty awesome to see working.

So then I talked the guy into spending a few minutes showing me a side-project he coded up, where the string of lights turned on one by one over half a second intervals, so it seemed like the lights ran down the length.

Too awesome, totally ordering a few Arduino's to play with. If you don't know what I'm talking about you can check out the Arduino homepage.

lol, we must collaborate then. im headed downtown this weekend to the shop that has the best deals on arduino in toronto. my goal by the end of the summer: 1 ultrafast remoe control car (possible iphone remote controls), 2. (time permitting) a quad copter with built in gps and stabilizer to become a personal UAV that i can intervene with manual control.

I used one for a very limited amount of time during one class I took developing mechanized artwork. I signed up to reddit.com/r/arduino which seems to have a decent community.

step 1 completed. i have purchased the car i will be converting with the arduino board (im thinking either make it autonomous or iphone controlled, or both)