Let It Glow: 10 Best LED Gadgets
Posted on December 29, 2007 in Technology
LED gadgets are a lot of fun. Some have practical uses which can make daily life easier, while others are used primarily for decoration.
But not all LED gadgets are worth your time, such as the LED Flashing Sweetheart kit and the Flashing LED Finding Nemo Clown Fish Necklace.
So, here are 10 of the best LED gadgets around, for those who love useful things that glow.
Made popular by Chris Pirillo on his live stream, these LED clocks look confusing, but prove surprisingly intuitive. The clock consists of four sections of blocks, each representing a digit on the clock. The number of illuminated blocks in each section is the digit. For example, in this picture, the clocks read 12:34.
Bi-Color LED Blow On-Off Candles
There’s something to be said for the simple elegance of these LED candles. Made of solid wax, they emit a gentle, flickering light, and look convincingly like normal candles. Like regular candles, these can be “blown out,” but unlike those candles, these can also be “blown on.” They’re perfect for dorms where real candles aren’t allowed.
Somewhere between practical and just plain cool are these faucet lights. There are two kinds, one always causes the water from your faucet to stream with a cool blue aura, and the other changes from blue to red when the water temperature reaches 89 degrees, making the light a nifty visual indicator of water temperature.
Cyron HT1502 Media Highlighter System
Though Cyron markets these LED wands for placing behind home entertainment items to add a colorful aura to your media experience, there are plenty of other places you can put these color-changing lights in a room to create a dynamic glow and make the room more comfortable and aesthetically pleasing.
Garrity Power Lite 3 LED Crank Light
This compact flashlight is ideal for stashing in a drawer, a travel bag, or a glove compartment for that moment when you need it. The flashlight requires only one minute of cranking to provide an hour of bright LED light. The best part is the battery, which will never need replacing.
Spotlight Rechargeable LED Light
If you’ve ever dropped something down the edge of your car seat, you know how difficult it can be to find where the dropped item went. Weiguo Solutions came up with this clever little flashlight for those times you need some extra light in the car. It plugs into your car’s power outlet and recharges as you drive.
For the geekiest among us, these watches display the time in a binary format. The top row of lights represent the numbers 8, 4, 2, and 1, for the hours, and the bottom row represents 32, 16, 8, 4, 2, and 1 for the minutes. To get the time, add up the illuminated lights on each row. The time in the picture is 10:15 (8 + 2 on top, 8 + 4 + 2 +1 on bottom).
While no more useful than a normal umbrella, this LED umbrella gets points for its similarity to a lightsaber. With the push of a button, the shaft of the umbrella lights up, illuminating the holder and the surrounding area. While it’s probably an afterthought for most buyers, the umbrella also keeps you safe by making you visible to cars at night.
Multi-color LED Lightbulb with Remote
This LED lightbulb is perfect for mood lighting and parties. With 16 different colors, four transition effects, and multiple brightness settings, this lightbulb can change the atmosphere of any room. It fits into standard lightbulb sockets, and comes with a remote for changing colors and settings on the fly.
It doesn’t look like it, but the TENORI-ON is a musical instrument. It features a 16 x 16 LED button matrix which serves as both the input and the display, allowing users to compose music visually and intuitively. After creating a musical composition, the user can save the recording to an SD card. Here’s the catch: it’s $1,200.
Dishonorable Mention: Optimus Maximus Keyboard
The Art. Lebedev Studio has been teasing tech fans with this OLED keyboard since July 2005, when images of it made their way around the web. The original release date was scheduled to be the end of 2006, but it was pushed back to December 2007 and January 2008 for customers who preordered the keyboard in May. Everyone else is out of luck. Sounds like too much work to get a $1,500 product.
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I got the Garrity Power Lite 3 LED Crank Light for Christmas. =) It is a great bridge between old world technolgy and new world tech.
The three lights on the front combine nicely to put out a single spot light too.