Insteon/ISY controlled LED lighting !!!

[snownh2o2]

Over the last couple of days I have been goofing around with some outdoor flexible LED strip lights that I had laying around. With the holiday season on the forefront, they seem to be begging me to incorporate them into a interactive holiday scene.

 

I have been using a cheap, low end controller with a RF wireless remote to do my playing. I think I could rather easily make a PC controller that would allow for much more advanced features. However, I would rather integrate them into my Insteon / ISY system. The problem is that all of the insteon controllers seem to only output open / closed signals. My LEDs are RGB, so I will be severly limited to only 6 colors and white (all on) and dark (all off). I would need to vary the output on each of the 3 channels to be able to utalize the full color spectrum of the RGBs. My strips are wired V+, R, G, & B.

 

On a side note, RGB LEDs under certain wiring configurations can have even greater potential. Though I currently lack the understanding, LEDs can be controlled in much more complex ways. Imagine a vertical stripe of RGB LEDs that initially are all blue. As the outside temperature rises (weatherbug plugin) the bottom LEDs begin fading to red. The red migrates up the strip until a present hight is reach according to the temperature. We have just built ourself a LED thermometer. LEDs wired in a matrix are capable of doing this on a 2 dimensional scale, so a square array could start one color and migrate to another as if it was being heated. As I said, this is currently above me, but could be more attainable in the future.

 

In my present future, I could see, LED lit, low level landscape lighting (warm white) that strobes to red when the alarm system trips. Or lighted walkways that follow a person (a few motion sensors calculating speed) as they walk down the path. For holidays the posibilities are huge. Imagine the Trans-Siberian Orchestra christmas house that was all over the TV a few years back. It was done with single color lights dimmed at various rates to the music. Now add to that the capability to change and/or 'run' the colors! As you maybe can tell, the more I type, the more excited I become.

 

What I am looking for is any ideas / products that will help me intergrate something like this into my system. I currently am using and ISY26, so I have no IR capablilites. I could probably be talked into one, however I must keep my budget within reason (it is just holiday lighting after all) or I will have quite a bit of explaining to do to the 'boss.' For some reason we have differing views on the value of automation vs. jewlery.