It's all about Arduino!

some hardware hacking stuff

enc28j60 with Arduino Nano

Sometimes it's not that easy to get the enc28j60 ethernet module working with the Arduino Nano.
I had various problems while trying to use the enc28j60 with my Arduino Nano v3.

In the end a friend gave me the hint, that I have to fix the UIPEthernet library, in order to get it running with the Nano.
Here you can download this slightly modified version of the UIPEthernet 1.07 libraray. You can simply import it via the GUI into your Arduino IDE.

WS2801/WS2812B RGB LEDs with Arduino Nano/Uno/Due

If you want to add some fancy lights to your room or do other cool LED stuff, the RGB strips or pixels with WS2801 or WS2811/WS2812B are definitely the right choice. You get them in very different forms and shapes at adafruit, amazon, alibaba or eBay. In most cases there are strips with either 30, 60 or even 144 LEDs per meter availible.

Before you can start with your LEDs, you need a power supply which can handle the power consumption of the LEDs. Therefore you have to calculate the maximum ampere value of the LEDs which could be 60x60mA=3.6A for a strip with 60 LEDs and each LED consuming 60mA on bright white.
I recommend you either an 5V 4A or an 5V 10A power supply, depending on the amount of LEDs you want to use. ;)

The LEDs can be very easily addressed by using the adafruit NeoPixel library, which can be found on github.