[Akiba] over at FreakLabs just put up a detailed tutorial outlining how to control and sequence lighting wirelessly ... to control the Arduino, providing simple example code to decode the Vixen ...

When the Arduino code sees the button getting pressed ... so the Arduino here is being used purely to drive the lighting effects. The more critical reader might argue that you could do both ...

At its core, the Arduino is a small, programmable microcontroller board that accepts and stores code from your computer capable of cool outcomes ranging from controlling lights to making music.