I'm a big fan of making cool little toys for my daughter. After building an example "personal environmental monitoring" wearable (presented last year on stage at a Clinical IoT conference), I got really into the Light Blue Bean.

This project was intended to fit into a box of Tic Tacs. It creates some razzle dazzle light displays when my 3-year-old daughter presses the button. It also can be reprogrammed over bluetooth, and even controlled from the iOS-based sandbox app.

One of the crowd pleasers is using the X/Y pad to rotate and shift the color displays from my iPhone, which is surprisingly addictive.

The whole thing was designed with low power in mind. The logic level shifters and the booster circuit are shut down when the project is not connected or in use. Current draw is about 1mA when sleeping.

See details below for videos and photos. (Feel guilty that i got some twitter press thanks to Hackaday but didn't have these uploaded at the time.)