Chapter 1, An Introduction to the Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and Home Automation, introduces you to the technologies used in this book and provides a background to the world of home automation.

Chapter 2, Getting Started Part 1 – Setting up Your Raspberry Pi, teaches you about the Raspberry Pi and how to set it up, ready to use on your projects.

Chapter 3, Getting Started Part 2 – Setting up Your Raspberry Pi to Arduino Bridge Shield, provides you with a guide to setting up your Raspberry Pi to Arduino bridge shield and downloading the necessary libraries.

Chapter 4, Our First Project – A Basic Thermometer, helps you to build a thermometer and introduces you to a variety of electronic components.

Chapter 5, From Thermometer to Thermostat – Building upon Our First Project, expands upon our Thermometer project, turning it into a working thermostat that can switch relays on and off.

Chapter 6, Temperature Storage – Setting up a Database to Store Your Results, explores storing data output from your Thermostat, and then accessing it via a web browser.

Chapter 7, Curtain Automation – Open and Close the Curtains Based on the Ambient Light, teaches you how to integrate motors into your projects for opening and closing blinds and curtains, using the skills learned in previous chapters.

Chapter 8, Wrapping up, provides an overview of other technologies you can use in your project and a look towards the future of home automation.

Appendix, References, lists a collection of links pointing you towards the resources used in this book and other interesting information.

For this book, you will need the following components and software:

Other software required for the projects in this book will be downloaded from the Internet with step-by-step instructions in the relevant chapters.

This book is aimed towards the amateur home automation enthusiast who has some basic skills in programming and is looking for some simple projects to get started with. An in-depth knowledge of electronics is not required, and the book provides a step-by-step guide to setting up components and software in each chapter.

No prior knowledge of the Linux operating system or the Raspberry Pi is needed, although exposure to these technologies will certainly be helpful.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: "The previous program contains two functions, void setup() and void loop()."

A block of code is set as follows:

void setup(void) {
  printf("Starting up thermometer \n");
  Wire.begin();
}

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

mkdir arduPi
cd arduPi

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Select the Accessories option from the menu".

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