For those of you who like to build things and tinker with low cost
electronics, there are some interesting open source projects going on.

Here's one that I just found that seems particularly interesting
because it offers a lot of options for building sensor based systems
to log, report, transmit and process various kinds of data. Some of
it seems like it might also be applicable to home or automobile
automation projects.

http://www.sailoog.com/en/openplotter

Like all of these projects you have to be interested in tinkering with
both hardware and software. The good news is that the hardware
platforms they are using are low cost and readily available.