Accento

Accento was a modular WiFi-enabled lighting display I worked on as an R&D contractor at Contraption Inc. (now defunct) between 2011 and 2012. It was envisioned as a piece of furniture that would display animated RGB light patterns controlled through an app on your smart phone. In essence it was similar to the Nanoleaf products now widespread and loved by content creators and gamers today.

The project was unfortunately too far ahead of its time. The high-power embedded computing landscape at the time was not very friendly towards smaller companies and addressable RGB LEDs were still quite expensive. In particular, the embedded Linux computer used to drive the display was very expensive and still regularly struggled with meeting our performance requirements. This all meant the product was looking to be too expensive to be marketable and the project was terminated.

Photos

Unfortunately I don’t have any decent photos of Accento (cell phone cameras were not great back then), but these should at least give you an idea of what the rough prototype looked like: