Roth Mobot shared a nice project about an “interface between the Internet and a common circuit bent toy.

We decided to create a circuit that would activate a toy whenever someone logged into Roth Mobot’s web site. We designed a simple and elegant solution using an Arduino, a home made Vactrol, a common electronic toy, and three simple scripts written in different programming languages. We’d like to thank William Swyter for lending us his Arduino, and Factory Smoke for his Vactrol suggestion, which stopped us from creating overly-complicated custom circuitry with transistors and diodes, and made the programming a piece of cake. The result was an elegant circuit that electrically insulates the toy from the Arduino (and the computer) by “optically coupling” them with light.

via [RothMobot]