einball built a switch that turns the heater on to make the room comfy using an Arduino:
As the walls are quite thick, it takes a while for the electric heater to heat the room. Afters about an hour the temperature reach comfortable levels. The solution was to built some kind of switch that turns the heater on to make the room comfy. A networked solution was the best way to achieve this.
I used an Arduino and a Network shield to hook the thing up to the TCP/IP network. After I successfully connected to the home network I wrote some code to let the Arduino deliver a simple webpage to the client. When the client clicks on one of the two links showed on the site, the Arduino either ties a pin to VCC or to GND.