Enthusiast Graham McMicken has designed and built an impressive Arduino-powered home thermostat system that not only looks good, but has a graphical user interface and also infrared remote control. Based on an Arduino Mega, real-time clock IC and various 1-wire temperature sensors, the final result is a winner.
Impressive! This is an excellent example of how you simultaneously build your own replicas of commercial products, learn something and save money. For more information, visit Graham's detailed website here, and examine the sketch here. And we're on twitter, so follow us for news and product updates as well.
To get started with your own home thermostat, apart from a range of Arduino-compatible boards we have the super accurate DS3232 real-time clock module, DS18B20 temperature sensors, and a range of protoshields to mount the external circuitry. Furthermore, you could enable monitoring and control over the Internet by improving on Graham's design using a Freetronics EtherTen. Apart from being fully Arduino Uno-compatible, it has onboard Ethernet, microSD socket and supports optional Power-over-Ethernet:
