It would be extremely fair to say that Tindie is well served with lovely glowing LED things! Long may that continue, but equally it can mean that occasionally something beautiful can slip us by. The Sensory Bridge from Lixie Labs falls very much into the beautiful camp!

We love the apt product tagline “Sensory Bridge isn’t your grandpa’s ‘light organ’!” which, when you look into the specification, is very accurate. It’s an incredibly sensitive and tweakable LED music visualizer with extremely low latency. The base unit is supplied assembled and is compatible with any WS2812B, APA102 or SK9822 addressable RGB LED strips. Alternatively, you can add the “Mini Mast” option to your order so you have a nice 128 LED strip that plugs directly into the unit.

The three knobs provide an intuitive simple control system to interact with. The “Photon” knob acts as a dimmer for the LEDs, “Chroma” affects the colour response to the music stimuli and “Mood” is how quickly the LEDs animate. There are a couple of buttons: the “noise” button is used to prevent unwanted noise from affecting your light show. Simply pause your music, press the button and the unit samples the noise and calibrates accordingly! The “mode” button helps you cycle between 6 light show modes and can also invert the light show mode for more variety.

Speaking of more variety, more modes are promised in future firmware updates. There is also an online configuration tool that allows you to reconfigure the unit via WiFi, setting up your custom LED strip lengths and more. As for how it looks, well, it’s definitely worth checking out the video below which includes an incredible vocal performance! Also, have a look at @lixielabs Twitter feed for more examples. Hat tip to Stargirl (@thevalkyrie) whose recent tweets about her Sensory Bridge (with a fabulous video) brought this excellent open-source project to my attention!