I’m going to delay my re-entry into the workforce by another month to work on an LED project. This will be the most complex piece of lighting I’ve ever attempted, incorporating 1,344 individually addressable RGB LEDs driven with 24-bit gamma-corrected color. That’s over four thousand individual control channels which have to be timed at megahertz resolution. On top of that, the display will be running an evolving, adaptive, algorithmically-generated animation loop… and the computation will be distributed across a peer-to-peer processor network. I am so excited I can barely stand it.

Why am I doing this? My friends Michael T. and Likhita K. want a custom chandelier for their dining room and asked me to design it. We spent a few hours last week with a couple bottles of wine, kicking around ideas, and came up with a concept incorporating trees, waves, and fireflies… it’s going to be beautiful and unique, a little bit Art Nouveau, blown glass and wrought iron and braided copper… all powered by an array of ARM processors.