Until now, we have only built home automation systems that can be accessed locally. We built XBee motion sensors, controlled lights via Wi-Fi, and also measured temperature and humidity data using Bluetooth. In this chapter, we are going to take another approach to building home automation systems.

We are going to make some measurements on your Arduino board, but send this data to a cloud service called Xively instead of sending these measurements to a local server. Xively is an online platform where you can send data from various devices such as Arduino. We want to send data to Xively so that it can be recorded on their servers, and after that it can be accessed from anywhere in the world through a web browser.

This will be the first project of this book: linking home automation to the "Internet of Things", which is a major trend at the moment. The Internet of Things is this idea of having every device connected on the Web, such as not only...