For conceptual blockbusting, inspiration, and to get your stalled creative juices flowing, I recommend the following:

• Design News’ Gadget Freak series
• Instructables
• Make Magazine
• Sparkfun
• Circuit Cellar

Gadget Freak this week featured a tiny simple PIC system which calls your cell phone when something happens in your house.  It uses dirt-simple pulse dialing (by toggling the phone line with a relay).  Of course, in the aiosphere we’d do it the hard way, by messaging a server and having a widget SMS you.  Still, very clever and very inspiring!

At a cafe today I saw a wonderful collection of antique jack in the boxes.  It occurs to me that these could be used instead of a traditional baby monitor.  (of course, the aiosphere cannot be used for mission-critical or safety-critical systems).  I’d probably build them such that they can both launch and reset themselves.  They would pair with a device at the baby, perhaps a stuffed animal, that would detect the baby’s waking and trigger the popup and music downstairs.  The parent could then go upstairs, calm the baby, then push a button on the stuffed animal to reset it.  Or, perhaps it automatically resets when the baby quiets.  If a user intervention is required, it should be something more subtle than a button.  Turn the animal’s head or something?

Steampunk / mechanical hit counters are a fun idea for ambient/desk gadgets. Electromechanical counters, which make a satisfying click. Ringing a bell, playing a chime, or a small robotic or electromechanical element which makes a signature movement. Lots of interesting alert possibilities out there, all dirt simple to do with the aiosphere.

Many simple output devices, LED and text, could make interesting clocks. I like the idea of a little text display which is made into a clock by the network driver. As well as the LED ideas I have talked about before.  I also like the idea, strange or not, of a generic system which is turned into a clock by software somewhere on the network.  Check out PC Mag’s collection of geeky clocks.