In this chapter, we will be using the Arduino bridge shield. We already introduced the Arduino bridge shield in Chapter 2, Getting Started – Setting Up Your Raspberry Pi and Arduino.

In the past, you used an Arduino microcontroller connected to your Raspberry Pi over the Ethernet. With the Cooking Hacks bridge shield, we can use our Raspberry Pi for direct interaction with Arduino shields. This provides us with an option of writing Arduino programs on the Raspberry Pi and reusing the existing shield hardware that we purchased. Therefore, your Raspberry Pi control unit can also double up as a microcontroller-like device to interact with your home when you connect the hardware to its GPIO pins.

To start writing applications that can harness the bridge shield, you need to install the arduPi library made by Cooking Hacks. This library will allow us to write Arduino-like applications and run them on the Raspberry Pi.