I was just chatting with my chum Duane Benson, who is Director of Marketing over at Screaming Circuits. As part of our conversation, I asked if Duane had seen my Droolworthy Steampunk Rocket Lamp blog featuring this video of the awesome creation by Garrett Schmidt, who is the ruler of all he surveys at Frankengeek Laboratories.

While Duane was feasting his orbs on the video, I said, “Tell me you don’t want one of these bodacious beauties on your desk.” He replied, “I can’t tell you that because I do want one of these on my desk!”

I will have some exciting news to report involving something I’m working on with Screaming Circuits and Sunstone Circuits in a future blog. For the moment, however, we have other fish to fry.

As you may recall, Garrett bills himself as an IoT Junkie, Technology and Application Matchmaker, Master Tinkerer, and Ghostbuster. The point is that Garrett is on a mission to teach folks about the IoT and, as part of this, he wrote a great tutorial with step-by-step instructions describing how you can Build Your Own Cloud-Connected Temperature and Humidity Monitor in 30 Minutes for Less Than $20!

All I can say is that this would be an awesome project to introduce someone to a bunch of stuff, including the Arduino, sensors, Wi-Fi, and building a dashboard in the cloud.

As always, I’m amazed by the things you can do these days. Can you remember how much time, effort, and money it would have taken to achieve something like this just a few short years ago? Suffice it to say that it would have taken a lot longer than 30 minutes and it would have cost a lot more that $20! What say you? What are your thoughts on all of this?