roy g. biv

Posted on By Wil

I have fallen in love with this bad ass ambient orb that goddess Jen from Think Geek sent me. I love it so much, I think I’m going to buy a few more and put them all over my house. I set my orb to reflect the weather (because, you know, walking outside to see how hot it is would be too much work), and it’s currently bright red, because it’s over 100 degrees here in Pasadena. Goodtimes.
Do any WWdN readers have one of these? If so, have you developed any special applications for it? I don’t quite grok the developer info (I guess I “gr-” it).

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Comments (64)

  2. I wish I had one of those. : ( Good luck with it Wil. I am sure you will find something totally cool/geeky to do with it.

  3. It’d be nice if someone sent me free gear, but who (in the real world anyway) has $150 to spend on a largely useless toy?!

  4. I don’t have one, but I want one now. It looks pretty cool. I wonder if I could tie it into my current poker session…

  5. Everything is cool when it’s free….
    This entry should be from the “Shameless Plug” department. You’re a good guy Wil I just have to poke you with a stick on this one.

  6. I saw a review of one of these, I think it was on Tech Live, and while it does sit around and look funky, it was never anywhere near correct as to the weather. Either you got lucky with yours, or the thing couldn’t help but be right with the heat you’ve got…

  8. A friend of mine helped developed it (they’re littered all over his house). I’ll send him over to your blog and see what he can recommend. I know that one possible application is to use it to track traffic, though I’m not quite sure how one would do that.

  9. No, I don’t have one… But looking at the links, I WANT ONE!!!!!!!11one
    That looks seriously fucking cool. Congrats, Wil, on your newest acquisition.

  12. I have one and have played with the development environment. But I haven’t thought of anything good to use for a data source. Have any ideas? Give me a good one and I’ll code it up.

  13. toys are nice….toys are important…some are imported…like my teddy John Lennon….i can cuddle in bed with him and chat about bank robbery,election fraud,the recipe for perfect french toast and where that big fly went…but one can’t do that with an Orb…tsk

  14. jozjozjoz :: A friend of mine helped developed it (they’re littered all over his house)
    Hm, I guess that must be me.
    Wil :: Do any WWdN readers have one of these? If so, have you developed any special applications for it?
    Indeed, they are littered all over my house. My favorite one is the one we have in the office that tracks how full the office MP3 jukebox queue is. When it starts to fade towards red, you know it’s time for someone to go and request more songs.
    Mike :: But on second thought – Amazon sales rank would be far more entertaining.
    I think we have someone who’s doing that, as I recall.

  16. We have an orb also, my husband got it as a gift from google. We thought about setting it to the local Pasadena weather, but that’s Premium service. The orb often seems to have a hard time getting its signal even though it’s sitting right next to a large window, maybe because we have a TV and all these computers nearby in the room?
    A cool application, if we ever get Premium service, would be a custom application tracking the temperature in the room where we keep our amphibians – they need it cool all the time.

  18. Okay . . . tracking Amazon sales rank would be so cool!! Guess I have to lock down and learn how to code for it, eh?

  19. Help me out here. I buy a $180 product that relies on a proprietary commercial radio network. What if the company goes under? Am I stuck with a $180 paper weight? Have the thing use the National Weather Service’s existing Weather Radio network and I’ll buy an orb in a heart beat.

  21. My dad has one and he just loves it. He keeps it in his office and he said clients and co-workers are freaked out at first when they see it. It definitely is a conversation piece! He has only programmed his for the weather. He has the rectangular one. I have to admit, when I first looked at it I thought it was just a light. Quite an invention!

  23. :: But on second thought – Amazon sales rank would be far more entertaining
    A site where you could put in amazon book title and have it push to your orb would be incredibly useful. Orbs are only as fun as the content — terror alerts (which they have) are not so useful because who really believes it. But when the thing is blinking for rain I know it’ll rain later and that’s useful.
    Oh and to the obselescence comment someone made, there’s a developer kit that I use to squirt my own info over serial, so if they happened to go away it would stop being wireless but it would still work with informaiton.

  24. Hey, James, where can one get that developer kit? That would be perfect for the temperature info that I mentioned earlier.

  26. A question concerning the “Mister” in the rainbow:
    (Mr. Roy G. Biv)–the primary colors are Red, Yellow and Blue; the secondary colors are Orange, Green and Violet; where does Indigo fit in?
    Freeman 🙂

  29. I saw one of those in a store recently and ALMOST bought one for me and one for my Mom who likes to follow the stock market, because it’s supposed to turn a certain color when the market is good. I’d use mine for weather, for starters. But, they are the COOLEST things!!! Hope you enjoy yours!

  30. I think it would be a great web site traffic monitor, particularly for someone with a popular blog. You could look up and see, moment to moment, how popular you were. (Maybe on second thought, that wouldn’t be a good thing).
    Let’s see–you could put weight encoders under your laundry baskets so the spheres on the mantle in the living room would fade toward red to remind you that you were almost out of clean clothes.
    It would be really complicated, but it would be cool to tie it into some scheduling software, so if you were checking off things ahead of schedule, it would be green; just on time, yellow, and after scheduled, red.

  31. Site traffic is a great idea. It could grep the access logs, and change color based on how many requests are getting made each minute, or something like that.
    Or I could get it to cycle through various colors depending on how many comments the most recent blog entry has . . . this could be really fun!

  32. I was going to suggest that Wil submit it to Slashdot as a story, but the Ambient Orb has already been mentioned in a couple of stories.
    Actually working at a major computer lab, it would be great to use these to show the health/usage of the computer clusters, in sort of an artistic way. In the public areas of the building, you could have the orbs, which would be green for cluster under heavy use, blue for little use, red for some kind of system problems.
    Or at an accelerator laboratory, you often have TVs that show the health and the status of different parts of the accelerator. These orbs could be used as a more asthetic way of doing the same thing.

  33. Oh, hey, a couple of even better ones:
    Have one that goes from green to red when the grass needs mowing (the sensor system for this would be a project in itself).
    An finally Wil, have it tied to your word processor, so when you are on a deadline, the sphere slowly goes toward red if you’re not writing. But as you write, sphere will change back toward green. That way, if you’re playing PS2, and you look up and the sphere is red, you know it’s time to get back to it. (To really do this, you’d have to modulate its sensitivity according to the time of day, so that it wouldn’t be blood red when you got up in the morning.)

  34. I love in Australia, so I doubt we have a wireless network that would support it. This could make it even more fun as I could possibly make it connect to my own WiFi card.
    Possible cool applications:
    – Countdown in the current game of Counterstrike
    – Whether there are WWdN or Megatokyo updates
    – Moon phase anyone?
    – Unread email messages (when it’s read, you have to get busy!)
    – Mitch

  35. Oh oh…I have another one!
    My wife and I were just talking about this. She suggested that the color of the orb could be tied to the number of beers in the fridge. That would be tough to encode. But it would be much easier to encode the weight of a keg if you were having a party–when the sphere started to pass yellow toward orange, it’s time to send someone our for more drinks.

  36. Ok, Wil here’s a couple that you might be interested in:
    – Sports scores. You could see how well the Dodgers were doing from inning to inning.
    – Deadlines. For the next writing project. It gets more inflamed looking as the reckoning with the editor looms closer.
    – (But the best one yet…) Book sales. Watch the magical orb turn to gold as JAG goes over the top!

  37. I had to post this here, I found a really stupid google trick involving you Wil… totally by accident…
    http://www.livejournal.com/users/tocard/20374.html?mode=reply (I’m linking to my blog so that if anyone has a comment on this trick, I’ll see it – sigh, I need to get movable type.)
    Also, I think you can program those orbs to track Web Hits, so you could see traffic to your blog…
    (We need to get one to track our # of listeners…)

  38. My boyfriend thinks it sucks, that it’s useless, and above all, that they are a waste of money. I happen to like the Orb and Weather Beacon greatly but now I’m hesitant to buy one because he’ll shake his head and tell me it’s stupid.
    Regardless, if I had one of those things, I would program it to:
    -Tell me when certain episodes of my favorite TV programs are coming on (like my favorite episode of TNG, South Park, etc)
    -Tell me when the prices of 40GB iPods go down
    -Pulse a certain color to notify me that Bush is out of office

  39. I want freebies telling the weather!!!!!! Dammit.
    I have a little ball that glows when you put it in your hand, like in Starman. Does that count for geek? No…?
    yeah, ok… :trods toward the exit:

  41. Ummm…
    So why don’t you take the freebies, or ask these people for more, and auction them off? For the race? Because, Wil, you don’t need this sort of thing. And it counters exactly what Anne says about “giving up on Starbucks”.
    Maybe this is beyond what you can conceive right now, since things are going so well for you. I’m excited they are. But you’re asking for money from people who have to chose between eating out at a Denny’s once month or giving you that money and eating spaghetti or ramen again. And hearing about another nifty toy (and the whole meditation garden thing), well, it kinda upset me. Because I don’t get to go to Starbucks. In fact, a vending machine is beyond me right now. And I donated money I didn’t have because people’s lives are more important than my going out once in a while.
    Chris is your friend. Yeah, you’re going to walk, but you can raise the money other ways, like selling this stuff. I mean, you’re Wil Wheaton, and there are fans out there with money to spend, right?
    Just kinda upset.

  42. Okay, I feel like I layed a big guilt trip on you, and that wasn’t my intention.
    Your store, can you sell a tshirt with all the proceeds going to the race? What I want to do is help your cause more than anything. Good luck in all you do. You do more than most of us will or even are able to.

  43. No but my Gran has this thing that tells you all kinds of information, like the temp., humidity, weather for tomorrow, pressure, and all this stuff that you REALLY need to know.
    Going out to check the weather is a forbidden concept, just stick your arm out of the window and check the temp, that’s what I do-sure your neighbours will think your wierd for a while but they’ll get used to it and gradually it will catch on and the whole neighbourhood will be doing it!

  45. Does anyone know if you can get a tv version of this. What I’d really like is to be able to glance at my tv and find out if it’s hot, or if it *will* be hot in the future. Other great stuff to know would be the likelyhood if it will rain, be really windy and a whole bunch of other weather related info. I guess the ideal solution would be if there was some sort of channel that had this info that I could turn my tv too and simply glance at it when I wanted to know that info. Or maybe someone could program a website to display that same info, and I could just glance at my computer.
    If only there were some kind of weather channel on tv, or some kind of weather website.
    But seriously, I can’t afford stuff like that. An interested toy, but I really think it should be like 30 bux.

  47. My development team at shopping.com has an Orb; we use it to track the status of the latest hourly build of our software (green = OK, red = fix it!). We have it on a little stand on a table, surrounded by offerings (Jolt cola, ramen, other geek food staples) in efforts to “keep the orb green”.
    Even though the build process also sends an email out when it breaks or heals (so we don’t precisely NEED the Orb), it is very handy when you walk in our room to see it green and feel, “Ahh, at least the build is happy.” Visitors love the shrine (or rather, they shake their heads in disbelief, which I choose to interpret as love). So we’re very happy with our Orb.
    The only surprise about the orb is that there is a lag of up to 20 minutes between when we send out a signal to Ambient’s network and when the orb actually changes color. So it’s really not a real-time status indicator (and Ambient never claimed it was).
    mahlen
    Egotism is the anesthetic given by a kindly nature to relieve the pain of being a damned fool.
    –Bellamy Brooks

  48. Setting it to the Pasadena weather is too damn depressing, as it’s nearly always near or over 100 from April to September. And when you turn on the morning forecast you see that it’s 70 in Santa Monica. My vote is to set it to your writing deadlines.

  49. The Orb looks pretty cool. But for me, I just can’t believe you used the word “grok”. And no one has yet mentioned it. The only person I’ve ever met who has read that book is the person I loaned it to.

  50. Well, you finally found something to out-do all of my cool toys you lusted after at the Grand Slam.
    Any way to get this orb to be a Rememberall? Although I’m sure it wouldn’t help me remember what I’ve forgotten. Especially after a night out on the town.

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