Celebrating the Ethernet Cable

Not everyone enjoys routing a cable through their house. But everyone does love the speed of the internet through an ethernet cable. To celebrate the 40th anniversary of ethernet and the IEEE 802.3 standard for ethernet, the IEEE is holding a contest to celebrate and show the versatility and usefulness of ethernet. The “I Spy Ethernet IEEE 802.3” contest.

I recently built the Pet Water Warden for MAKE where I provided the basis of automatic pet station that uses an Arduino to control the pets water supply. The system can be expanded to have many features such as: adding a light sensor to dispense at a certain time of day, or control a pet feeder by connecting it to the Arduino. The Pet Water Warden utilizes ethernet in order to Tweet about an error in the system or when your pet is out of water. This can also be improved upon by adding a webcam, sending an email instead of a tweet, or anything that requires an internet connection.

I entered the Pet Water Warden into the I Spy Ethernet IEEE 802.3 contest with the hope that it will inspire more micro-controller projects that use the internet.

To check out the projects in the I Spy Ethernet Contest please go here.  The contest runs from Nov. 1- Dec. 31.

And to vote for the Pet Water Warden visit this page. If you really like a project, you can vote once a day!