New Arduino LED System Advice

[neltnerb]

Dear Adafruit,

I am building a new arduino system, and am trying to decide what features to include.

The core is an Arduino Leonardo for sure, since I want the free UART for other communication. It has attached 15W of LED light as RGB+white.

From there, I am considering adding on DMX control, a Xbee/RN-XV pinout for wireless communications and wireless programming, and a microphone with a frequency analyzer (MSGEQ7) so that people can do cool standalone interactive art.

Do you think this is worth trying to make? It obviously costs a lot to make prototypes, and I am trying to make this so that I can sell them to others for under $75 each... that might be impossible though.

Which features are most important to you all in a LED light based around the arduino? Cost? Lumen output? I am thinking currently to just use a triple pole dual throw switch so that you can switch between wifi, DMX, and user-added UART, along with connecting the pins to GPIOs so that you can do things like send data to one light over wifi and have it act as a DMX master to control others. Or just the ability to use the single light as a USB -> DMX controller (which seem to be well over $100 by themselves for some reason).

Any encouragement or advice would be very welcome =) Right now I'm excited because it seems that I can do 16-bit PWM on each of the RGB channels and 10-bit on the white, which should let me make extremely, extremely nice colors. I also want to control it all over OSC like with the Saiko5 fixture, but for a lot less cost.