in the beginning there was a video: Blinkenlights Arcade | arcade-documentation-video.m4v (project web page).
The scene where one of the ccc guys is checking the lights with his mobile in front of the massive BnF tower inspired me to hack a mobile likewise, well to control my tiny little blinkenleds display (see: time hacks).

Fortunately the little linux server behind the led display made no problems detecting the bluetooth dongle and allowed controlling it via PyBluez.
So the only challenge was to get myself into J2ME and ask my wife for permission to hack her mobile (imagine: I actually don’t have one…).

The whole J2ME/MIDP stuff is pretty straightforward. There are a lot of good introductory tutorials around. The Sun Wireless Toolkit made bundling pretty easy and with the mobile’s PC suite it was dead easy to deploy the jared code.

The only thing that gave me a real headache was to figure out the bluetooth connection code, well not really, it was more the fact that I had to disable authentication on the server side (-> hcid.conf …) to get things working …

Watch my simple led mobile paint application in action:

What next?

pong?
hm, I might buy myself a mobile and develop a fully fledged remote control for my living room server aka xbox.
… or continue with one of my other 5 million projects I started 20 million years ago …