Hasta La Gadget!

Water balloon fights are fun and they are a mandatory part of childhood. Adults love to get in on the action too whenever we get the chance. So if you are looking for some fun lighting that has a bit of nostalgia and a playful attitude, check out these water balloon pendant lights.

These unique and playful lights are inspired by water balloons inflating under a faucet. They were designed by Torafu Architects and they were displayed at the IFFT interior design show in Tokyo last month.

They’re not light bulbs in the usual sense, though they do have the shape. Each of these glass bulbs is backlit by an LED which highlights the bubbles and curves in the glass. They look like they emit a nice soft glow.

Too bad you can’t pluck them from their leads and throw them at each other for a light/fight show.

[via Spoon & Tamago via Neatorama]

Philips has been offering some interesting lightbulbs over the years that can do a number of things, one of which is save you a ton of cash on your electricity bills. Starting in January, the U.S. will put an end to incandescent bulbs as the country attempts to move on to a future filled with LED bulbs. Philips is stepping up their LED game with its new 60-watt-equivalent SlimStyle LED bulb. (more…)

Philips’ SlimStyle LED Bulb Available Jan. 2 For Under $10 original content from Ubergizmo.

ThinkGeek has turned another one of its April Fools jokes into an actual product. The Technomancer Digital Wizard Hoodie uses 32 multicolored LEDs and a speaker box to emit light and sound effects. The cool thing – or the dealbreaker, depending on how geeky you are – about the hoodie is that you have to activate the effects using hand gestures, as if you were casting a spell.

The hoodie has nine spells or sets of effects. There’s a fireball spell, a health restoring spell and even a water bending spell. The LEDs are attached to a hood assembly as well as to its inner sleeves. While most wizards use mana, this hoodie runs on six AA batteries, which you’ll insert into its built-in battery compartment. Skip to 1:25 in the video below to determine whether you have the moxie to don this robe.

You can get the hoodie for $120 (USD). Cast the browsing spell and head to ThinkGeek to order.

When the power goes out, it’s terrible. Nothing works, and for some reason it’s impossible to remember that: I always find myself doing things like “well if I can’t watch TV I can at least read this book, I’ll just turn on the light…” and then nada of course. With SmartCharge, a new Kickstarter project, that might actually work, since it’s an LED bulb with a built-in power reserve that remains on uninterrupted when the rest of your power goes off.

The LED bulb component of SmartCharge fits standard light fixtures and cuts power usage by up to 90 percent vs. incandescents, and should last 25 years under normal usage conditions, if everything goes as predicted. When the power goes out, the SmartCharge bulb has a reserve battery built-in that’s good for up to four hours of lighting, which should be enough to weather most storms and brownouts.

The key to SmartCharge’s magic is that it recognizes and remembers the position of the light switch before the power outage, and then continues on again after the power returns as if nothing had ever happened. This smart switch position memory even works with two and three-stage lights, but there is a downside: It only works with one light in a series controlled by a single switch at the moment, though the founding team is sorting out a way it can work with a single switch that controls a whole bank of bulbs.

Founder Shailendra K. Suman previously started a successful propane gas tank metering company, as well as a lost item tracking gadget startup, and he has worked for Northern State Power in the past and has two degrees in engineering, so he knows a thing or two about brownouts and building things.

SmartCharge is seeking $50,000 in funding, and has already raised nearly $15,000 of that with 42 days left in the campaign. Backers qualify for a pre-order of a single SmartCharge bulb starting at $35, which is actually very reasonable when compared to the price of even basic, non-smart LED bulbs these days. Suman anticipates shipping to backers will begin in April next year.

Remote-controlled helicopters can be fun to fly, but they’re not exactly easy to see in the dark. But these little R/C choppers not only light up when flying, their blades can display messages while airborne.

The helicopter’s spinning blades have LEDs on them, which can be programmed to display dot-matrix text or icons which emerge while the blades spin, thanks to a persistence of vision illusion.

Simply enter the text you want to display using the companion app (which appears to be Windows only), choose the animation pattern, and download the data to your helicopter. The text is designed to be legible when viewed from the ground looking up at the helicopter.

The helicopter itself has 8-inch gyro-stabilized blades, and can be charged via USB. The LED R/C Helicopter is available from Brando for $39.90(USD).

It would be cool to see this same technology applied to multi-blade drones too.