An awesome idea for hardware.....

[Destructionator XV]

In the BOFH stories I've been reading, the Bastard has an awesome network status panel, with lights and buttons telling him how the routers are doing, etc, all in a centralized place.

Well, I want something like that on my LAN, and here's how I would like to do it: build a USB I/O board. It has a bunch of LEDs and maybe switches (buttons and dials would be awesome too) that are controlled through the USB port.

So it receives signals to power on or off LED # whatever from USB and does it, and any buttons, switches and all would send signals back though the USB to the computer, which decides what to do.

So I have a series of questions here:

1) Do you know of anything like this which is commercialy avaliable?

if not,

2) Do you think this is a feasable project to do it yourself? Remember too that I am a code monkey, not an electrical engineer, so that is going to make things harder.

3) Any ideas for a ballpark cost for this project?

And lastly, does it sound awesome or not? Almost as awesome as outfitting my house with card key operated doors.... naturally, centrally managed from my computer, of course...