According to legend, one of the reasons why the Xbox logo jewel on the controller is so large is because the Xbox team wanted it to glow a freakish Xbox green. As the legend goes, this feature was cut for cost reasons, leaving us with a big, useless jewel in the center of our controllers.

Now with all the folks around here lighting up the jewel in their console, I thought that it would be cool to make the controller jewel legend come true, and so I'm lighting mine up. I plan to use 16 LEDs controlled by a microcontroller so that onlookers can be wowed by freakishly green flash/fade/wave effects...

I'll post pics when I'm done. In the meantime, I'd like to know if anyone thinks that they might be interested in PCB gerbers or the finished product?

hehe cool

16 LEDs?? I hope you plan to do this on the bigger controller. Either way thats ALOT of LEDs. People have lit up the controllers already, including the jewel, but none have done 16 LEDs in a flash/fade/wave effect.

Again, I'm talking about surface mount LEDs here.

As an interesting sidebar, it appears that M$ did indeed originally want to light this thing up, as the Xbox logo is printed on transparent plastic.