rutherfj

For $199 you get 3 bulbs and the wireless "hub". Additional bulbs to expand your collection are $59.

They are way too expensive IMHO. If I did not have the idea to hack this together with Minecraft, I never would have purchased them.

And really good if you like to go underground at night and mine. Then you know when the sun rises!

Building up "brownie points" before he turns into a teenager!

That is my next plan!

Ya, there is no requirement to have to mess around with the time in the game. It can all be done with the separate app.

Correct - there is no official SDK, but a quick search at Github will give you quite a few projects using a variety of languages to choose from.

I love this screencast series. What makes it so successful (IMHO) is that each weekly screencast is short enough to watch during a lunch or coffee break. Every week there is something useful. When somebody asks me how to learn Obj-C/iOS development, one of my first recommendations is to subscribe to this.