I have to start by saying that I love this little thing, but for reasons that won't translate to a very wide audience. It's a piece of plastic with a USB cable without any manual controller. I personally don't agree with the description that it's "fashionable" - I won't be mounting this on the wall in a prominent place. If I ran a warehouse and wanted to guide forklift traffic, I could mount it near an intersection to guide traffic, but there's stll the little detail of making it work.Therein lies the core reason why I love it: with a Raspberry Pi, or some other system where you can control a USB port, it's programmatically possible to activate the lights. It takes a 5V connection, which is, conveniently, what a USB port provides for power. On my Debian system it mounts as /dev/ttyUSB0 and you can set the communiation channel with "stty -F /dev/ttyUSB0 9600 cs8 -cstopb -parenb".From there it's possible to send Hex codes from the command line like this: "echo -e '\xA0\x01\x00\xA1' >/dev/ttyUSB0" You can make a light be steady on, flash, or off, and you can do that with all three lights simultaneously. There's also a beep you can turn on and off. My personal project goal is to grab some data, like weather conditions and the short term forecast, and then translate that into a pattern that indicates current conditions and the short-term forecast.That's why I love it - it's a project toy. There are some oddities about it and it comes with no documentation. If you buy it, print out the product description so you have a copy of the Hex codes! There are a couple of sentences with it that are the key to making it work. It leverages a buffer and I haven't quite figured out the right path to turning things on and off reliably (there's a sequence I need to crack).The hardware itself is decent enough as in it doesn't feel cheap, but it's plastic so don't hang something important from it. Also, the plastic base doesn't have a molded channel for the USB cable. If I mount this to a wall , I'll need to carve out some of the plastic so the base doesn't bite into the cable (there's a place at the base they thinner so you can make a notch). I wish they'd done that and provided just a little better documentation on how to send it signals.