This is when I feel envy toward engineers who can program hardware. I'm so involved with Ruby and HTTP and CSS etc. that I have negligible knowledge about Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and Beaglebone.
I don't even know where to start and whether it will be a fruitful exercise (i.e. will I be able to devote sufficient time to it to actually learn something worthwhile).
Anyway, this is a neat project and I wish you good luck OP!
With any of these three platforms you could be doing this project in an afternoon. Processing isn't any harder than Ruby. You can do it.
Check out http://Raspberry.io for some resources the python community put together to use Raspberry Pi
Check out makezine for resources designed for people who aren't even familiar with programming. It doesn't take much to get up to speed with some basic on/off circuits. With a little high-school physics or just some asking around of friends you can get custom devices going.
I don't even know where to start and whether it will be a fruitful exercise (i.e. will I be able to devote sufficient time to it to actually learn something worthwhile).
Anyway, this is a neat project and I wish you good luck OP!