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I am sure that many of you already know what an Arduino is. For those who are unfamiliar with an Arduino, it is an open source hardware project. It empowers electronics hobbyists to build awesome projects without having to waste too much time on the dirty work. For more accurate description, I strongly urge you to read:  http://arduino.cc/ If you are looking for a more powerful piece of hardware, you should be getting a raspberry pi:  http://www.raspberrypi.org/  Its a $50 CPU; you could connect external mouse, key board and monitor to have a bare-bones computer. Using an arduino, one can read data of sensors easily. For instance, temperature could be read out of an temperature sensor IC. Based on the type of the sensor IC, the value of the temperature is either analog (as in LM35), in which case we could use the pins A0-A5 to directly read the output of the sensor, or if we use a sensor like TC74A0 we could use the I2C protocol to read the temperature out of the memory of the IC.