Reply to Controlling lights with MIDI. Can it be done cheaply and DIY-ly?

I just had an epiphany like you wouldn't believe.

Part of me has always admired Daft Punk's live sets. You've all seen 'em. The pyramid? Well the lights for them were spectacular. The visual effects are second to none IMO. Oh, and the music is good too.

I was searching for lights for my rather modest mobile DJ setup, but then I realized that a really great (or even sub-par) lighting rig could easily cost hundreds or thousands of dollars. As a kid in high school without a steady job, I wasn't sure what to do.

Until I saw these two items. One being a strobe light that can be controlled remotely by this controller. I was actually planning on buying two of these strobe lights and the controller, until I realized that it wouldn't be in time with the music. That's not a big deal at all, but then it hit me.

I use Ableton Live for my mobile gigs, so everything is already in time. Ideally, I could sync the strobe lights up with any MIDI pattern that I wished, allowing for a dynamic and live lightshow easily mappable to my APC40. The sound card I DJ with (a Novation Nio 2/4) has MIDI I/O that I never use while DJing, so I figured I could do something like this:

MIDI pattern in Ableton-->Nio 2/4-->Some electronic gismoes and gagedtry-->switches for light setup.

If I wanted to get really crazy I could have different lights on different channels, but I can't afford diddly squat right now. It's some food for thought though. I'm just looking for something to control the flashes of the strobes at this point.

What d'you guys believe of this idea? Has it been done? I bet it's been done. I didn't find anything within my budget, even with intense googling, though, so I dunno. Maybe I'm asking a noob question. I don't know anything about DJ lighting.