Temperature And Electricity Monitoring

[Willem] has been using an Arduino to monitor temperatures and electricity usage. For the temperature monitoring he picked up some 1-wire temperature sensors similar to those we’ve featured in the past. To pick up on electricity usage he’s not using an amp sensors, but because he’s in the UK he does have a flashing LED on his power meter. There’s a known trick to pick up these flashes with a photo cell to calculate energy usage based on meter readings. Finally, the data from the three sensors (indoor temp, outdoor temp, and energy usage) is piped over the Internet via an Ethernet shield so that it can be collected and graphed.

[Willem] has had the system running for a year. If you’re nosy you can look at the temperature graph generated from his collected data.

Nook Rooted Without Being Opened

If you’ve got a nook, and wanted to get root privileges, but really didn’t want to open up your fancy new toy. We have good news. The people over at nookdevs have found that the nook looks for updates from the external microSD slot at boot time. Simply download the patch, load it and boot. Though it was previously possible to get root privileges before, you had to physically open the device. While we would have opened it anyway, we understand that there may be people who prefer not to.

Bluetooth Handset Hacks

Cramming Bluetooth headset circuitry into an analog telephone body has become an extremely popular hack. With declines in the prices of these headsets, and older telephones being seen as storage-room-clutter this hack is just waiting for you to get started. Join us after the break for a look at what others have already accomplished.

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