Tired of the hoodlums destroying your pumpkins? Looking for a little payback? Here’s a project that will allow you to get some vengeance. Plus, it’d be fun to shoot silly string at the older kids that show up on your front step this Halloween.

Need to know the weather? Need to check Woot? Want to read the news? Well, all you need is an Arduino board, an LCD read-out, four buttons, a breadboard, some experience in electronics, and a computer. Then you can build yourself a Droplet.

Brewing your own beer by hand is soooo 1992. You can now automate most of the process using an Arduino controller and some source code over at Halfluck.com.

This cool system uses an Arduino board and home wiring to turn your local home telephone network into an intercom. When you take the phone off the hook it disconnects from the phone line and rings all of the phones with a different cadence. When you pick up the phone you get an open line so you can talk with loved ones and burglars who have broken in anywhere in the house.

This Sparkfun project by Nate creates a keyless entry fob for a Mazda using a Nike+iPod kit, allowing you to leave your car keys at home. Using a serial board you can read the input and output bits of the footpod and grab signals and decode them.

Why this hasn’t been done before is a mystery to me. This little hack project by Kellbot of NYCResistor takes a rolling ball, an optical mouse, a gutted PS2 controller, and some Arduino hacking and makes it into a working (and awesome) virtual Katamari. Why didn’t they have special controllers like this that came with the game? It makes so much sense!

Video or it didn’t happen. Oh, video is inside! What now, boyee?

Those little scamps over at Adafruit are always up to something. This time they built a “pager scanner” which is basically a system that grabs all of the pages transmitted on pager networks and displays them. Sadly, the pager network isn’t as juicy as it used to be and now only drops sports scores and emergency broadcasts.

This kaleidoscopic fever dream of a coffee table is equipped with a 9×9 matrix of LEDs, which can apparently be set to “acid flashback” mode if necessary. It’s kind of like a demonically-possessed Lite Brite. When it’s not blasting color at your living room, though, I can think of a couple interesting uses for it.

Since neckwarmers just can’t be neckwarmers, this guy put together a LilyPad Arduino neckwarmer. A simple neckwarmer was modified with lights, a LilyPad Arduino, and a light sensor to make the lights blink when it’s dark.

So you need your project to pause for a preset number of minutes but you can’t do it programatically? Why not connect a micro-controller to an hourglass egg timer to sense when the sand stops moving through the glass. A motor then resets the hourglass once the sand runs out, thereby repeating the process, ad infinitum. Pretty groovy, huh?

It’s really more half-a-Triscuit-sized. This little 1.2″x0.7″ $20 board is a good solution for your home projects that require a little computation but not a lot of space. Say you want to put a little RFID detector in your door that unlocks it when you come near. Don’t need a big hard drive-sized package nailed to the door; with a Teensy you could practically embed the system in the doorknob.

Make’s Phil Torrone entered this odd gadget, the Tweet-a-Watt, in the Green Gadgets design competition. It’s essentially a Kill-a-Watt with a capacitor and transmitter added that will Tweet your current power usage using a nearby computer or wireless Arduino mini PC.