Bright ideas

One qualitity that I'm constantly seeing in other engineers is their ability to continually come up with new and interesting ideas for various projects - I guess I'm not an exception to the rule then.
One idea was prompted by my recent week spent over at beach mission. Basically there is one gave were we have to try and determine the relative sound intensity of the children. We could manage to do this by ear - but it could be heaps cooler building a gadget to do so. So project 1 is a simple sound level metre. It would use a small electret mic condenser which is sampled by a microcontroller every 10ms or so. An array of LEDs could then be used to display a moving average of the sound level - say every 250 to 500ms. A button could also be included to allow the maximum sound intensity for a period to be displayed.

The second project can be found here: It is a centrifugal based BB launcher. Since I'm currently waiting on parts for both the coil launcher and air controlled launcher - this could be interesting in the mean time.