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Another neat way to avoid having to pull the chip off of a board to program it is to build a clip-on programmer, using a chip-clip (the kind meant to clip onto the sides of IC chip pins, not the kind meant for keeping your potato chips from getting stale). This is especially useful if you might want to reprogram a microcontroller after permanently soldering it to a board, since you don't have to design in a programming header. Depending on how you wire it up you can use it with a serial bootloader or an ISP-programmer. I've made clip-on programming adapters for DIP and SOIC package AVRs, and I would post pictures/links, but I'm afraid that would get this post held indefinitely for review (still waiting for my flashlight project post to be 'reviewed'). Instead, you could hop over to Digikey and search for the "Test Clips - IC" category. -Adam

Great primer! Windows XP remote desktop has saved my hide more than once. It's only built into professional edition, but you can download remote control clients for other versions of the Windows OS, or even for Mac OSX. If your motherboard supports it and you can configure your router to broadcast the wakeup packets you can use Wake On Lan to turn your computer on from anywhere too, so you don't have to leave it on all the time. Although it isn't shown as a normal start-menu option, you can also turn off your computer remotely by going to the task manager (start->run->taskmgr) and choosing "Turn Off" from the "Shut Down" options menu. Be careful about pulling up the task manager with ctrl+alt+delete though, I've turned off the local computer I was using more than once that way! -Adam

Here's a similar project, just a little more in depth: http://www.diyphotography.net/diy_the_cheap_yet_shamefull_underwater_housing They address the condom clarity problem and have some videos taken underwater with the camera. The soft glue they use probably works better than hard crazy-glue, but it's just an extra level of protection. Wow, it's hard not to make puns about this project! -Adam

You can lay your own multi-point interface over a monitor or media projector screen using a Nintendo Wiimote, some infrared LEDs, a bluetooth enabled PC, and some free software from a very smart PHD student at CMU named Johnny Chung Lee. It's not quite as nice, but it is possibly cooler, and costs orders of magnitude less. Go to: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/wii/ and scroll down to: "Low-Cost Multi-point Interactive Whiteboards Using the Wiimote" I had a little trouble with the software until I installed the latest version of DirectX, then it worked like a charm! -Adam P.S. Check out Johnny's other neat projects too!

Rather than soldering directly to the AVRISP board, you could make an adapter cable and keep your warranty intact. Or for a super-clean solution, SparkFun also carries an “AVR Programming Adapter” board for just under a dollar. They advertise it for connecting older 10-pin programmers to newer 6-pin ISP devices, but it works both ways: http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=8508 (header pins/sockets are also available, but not included) I recently encountered an unusual AVRISP problem, but with a quick easy fix. The mkI programmer has polarized 6 pin and 10 pin sockets, but the AVRISP mkII just has six bare header pins. A forum-friend recently received one with the header cable plugged in backwards internally (new, out of the box, straight from Digikey!), and it took forever to figure the problem out. I’m sure this is rare, but watch out! -Adam P.S. How’s the 136 year archive coming along?