After subscribing to Make magazine I got the electronics bug again (way back when I was an EE guy) and picked up an Arduino which is a really fun little micro controller.
My project idea is to hook an optical mouse sensor and an lcd up to it and then attach it to my table saw fence to give me a digital read out of the cut width. The fanciest mice have a resolution of 6000dpi, which translates to 0.04mm which is crazy accurate… So far I have the LCD part of the equation working so all I have to do now is hook up the mouse.