Big Oil, you have just gained 10,000 mad scientist points for the frog. Bravo. Freaking awesome. I bow to you, sir.
The new Budweiser (and other) aluminum bottles are perfect pressure vessel projectiles for a rapid-fire water rocket, or just a recycling mortar. I've got a compressor, I'm thinking about an easy and fast nozzle rig that can be screwed onto your empty beer bottle, which then can fire it mortar-style into a recycling bin (useful) or pressurized like the old "water bomb" toy rockets we all had and send it far far away to be mined by my great great grandkids for the aluminum. Because of the shape and the construction, I am willing to bet those "bottles" can take a TON of pressure, probably far more than any nozzle I'd make could hold. They have integrity of the metal unlike cans, and the bottle "lip" begs for some type of easy to construct retention ring and nozzle. More to come.
More reasonable and coming soon: an RF linked shutter release system for wildlife photography. Pretty simple, really, just have to get to doing it. I want to be able to place a basic sensor (like a photoresistor, a mic/preamp, PIR sensor) a reasonable distance away and have it wait for threshhold conditions then release the camera shutter or trigger the flash. The only part of this I've not done before is the RF link, I think I am going to buy one of the 433kHz link "kits" you can get for about three bucks. Should be fine, it's not like the events I am looking for are over in microseconds-- the fastest would likely be the approach of hummingbirds to a feeder.. seconds if not longer to react. I am going to do a wired one first, in fact I may get to that later in the week, as the weather is terrible. It's a no brainer of a project, but the outcome should be good anyway..
A simple board for use with typical LCD displays (like the 1602 standard, etc) that convert them to either SPI or UART so they don't take so darn many pins. I want something I can slap between Arduino and those LCD's and just make it simpler. I think we all would like one of these from time to time...probably going to require a few library changes or making a fresh one from scratch..