Searching for a drive bay LED/LCD with buttons hardware and API

Question

My colleagues and I have got an interesting little prototype hardware/software project that would follow these loose requirements/specs/implementation details:

• Hardware:
  • Take simple user input from a couple of buttons, maybe a dial
  • Give some textual output to the user, a 3-line LED would suffice but fancier is OK
  • Powerful x86 CPU required
• Software
  • Windows-based OS
  • Simple, easy to program to API for LED/LCD pannel input & output. Preferable Java, or another high-level language.
  • No monitor connected in most use cases

It looks to me like my project is exactly what the HTPC folks are doing, but after an hour of Googling and researching, I can't seem to find any specifics on programming the hardware for HTPC cases from Silverstone, et al.

Can someone point me in the right direction?

Answer 1

LCDSmartie may be a source for your required library.

http://lcdsmartie.sourceforge.net/

You may need to use it as a basis for some hacking.