Slightly off topic, but it is tech (and Christmas) related. We’ve made some wireless Christmas lights at home this year thanks to a design published on Instructables by the Graffiti Research Lab.

The Labs develops open source technologies for graffiti artists. The genesis of the wireless lights is a project called LED Throwie.

A battery, magnet and LED are taped together to create a coloured point source of light. LED bombing has developed into a craze in the US where graffiti artists throw the magnetic lights at unusual locations.

The Graffiti Research Lab web site shows a hit on a sculpture in Astor Square, New York and a train in Linz, Austria. Flickr has loads of examples of campaigns but none in the UK that I can find.

Nothing so daring here: we’ve ditched the magnets and installed our LED Throwies in a dry stone wall. They’ll come down after Christmas, be dismantled and put away until next year.

The craze has been criticised for not being very environmentally friendly. LED Throwies are fairly cheap to make thanks to parts sourced from eBay and Maplin, but they only last for a couple of weeks before the battery dies, and by their nature they are rarely retrievable. Fair comment maybe, but they are a hell of a lot of fun.

Tags: graffiti, ledthrowies, project