We’ve just ordered one of these in to the office. It’s a mash-up of the computerey goodness of a Raspberry Pi and the hardware interfacing abilities of an Arduino. We just can’t wait to get our hands on it and find new depth in our projects. What we’re most excited about is the opportunity to link our hardware directly to databases and other Internet sources without having to use another piece of hardware.

We’ve currently got a project underway that requires on-demand encoding on a remote server so we thought it’d be a good idea to keep real-time tabs on how busy the server is by building an Arduino powered server monitor.

With a couple of LEDs, a buzzer, an Arduino with an Ethernet shield and a lot of brown tape we had ourselves a custom built indicator. The monitor will have an illuminated green LED to show that the server is idle. When the server gets an encode job in, the buzzer will sound and the red LED will become illuminated. Once the encode task has been completed the green LED will light up again.

Not bad for a quick 30 minute job, eh?

‘Tis the season for celebration and jubilation with your nearest and dearest so we thought we’d help document this festive time of year by building an automated photo booth powered by an Arduino.

To help out with festivities at a Christmas party, we thought it’d be pretty cool for the party-goers to be able to have their photos taken and get them displayed on a projected screen in the club. There would also be a live ticker of incoming text messages.

The users come along and hit a big red button on the table in front of them. They see a countdown from 3 on a scrolling LED display then the Arduino takes the photo using a Nikon D90. Then, through the power of wifi, the photo is beamed across the club to a projector to display it on the screen.