The ESP8266 is a chip that turned a lot of heads recently, stuffing a WiFi radio ... with a VirtualBox image with Ubuntu that includes GCC for the LX106 core used in this module.
For his example image, [CNLohr] has a few WS2812 RGB LEDs connected to the ESP8266 WiFi module. Uploading the image turns the LEDs into something controllable with UDP packets on port 7777.