At our daughter’s school, all the 2nd graders put together a “state board” project.  They are randomly assigned a state (in our daughter’s case, Vermont) and the students work to put together a poster on a tri-fold piece of cardboard.  From what I’ve heard, the projects often have 3D aspects like animals and products attached and several over the years have had buttons to play things like the state song.  We brainstormed possible elements we [...]

I spotted a post by Lior Hass on Hackaday a little while back where he described his Alarmino project where his alarm system now connects with an Arduino and a custom board to simulate the phone line and interpret Contact-ID protocol.  He could then get the system to SMS him in the case of an alarm.  In his case, he did this in lieu of using a central monitoring service and it only reported events that would [...]