Arduino Duemilanove

I'm in the stage of planning on how many sensors and what types I will use throughout the house. While Digi provides some basic sensors like temperature, humidity, brightness and some others there will always be a need for something specific. In addition to sensors there is also the ability to send out commands to control things like lights, fans, entertainment equipment, etc. To build my own sensors and control devices I picked up an Arduino Duemilanove, which is the latest revision of the basic Arduino USB board. It has 14 digital input/output pins, 6 analog pins, 16 MHz clock speed and 32K of Flash memory for holding programs. I've been playing with the IDE for writing programs, which are referred to as 'sketches.' So far I have been able to turn LEDs on and off, read values from input sensors like photocells and send data back to the computer via the USB connection.

There is a google code project called python-on-a-chip with a goal to allow a subset of the Python language to run on microcontrollers without an OS. I hope to be able to take my Arduino and install the PyMite virtual machine and be able to run some Python routines on it. How cool would that be???