Chapter 1, Building Wireless XBee Motion Detectors, covers a very common topic in home automation: motion detectors. We are going to build a swarm of motion detectors based on the well-known XBee protocol and Arduino. We are also going to build a server-side interface to monitor the state of the XBee motion detectors.

Chapter 2, Control Lights from Your Phone or Tablet, covers another popular topic in home automation systems: controlling lights remotely. We are going to interface a relay with Arduino and a Wi-Fi chip so that you can control lights in your home not only from your computer, but also from your phone or tablet.

Chapter 3, Measuring the Temperature Using Bluetooth, focuses on measuring temperature and humidity with Arduino, and transmitting the result back to your computer using Bluetooth. We are also going to build a simple interface using Python so that you can access the measurements made by the Arduino and Bluetooth system.

Chapter 4, Weather Station in the Cloud with Xively, teaches you to tackle a very trendy topic: the Internet of Things. We are going to make basic weather measurements on our Arduino board, and then transmit this data via Wi-Fi to the cloud using a service called Xively. Using this service, we'll be able to monitor our data remotely from anywhere in the world.

Chapter 5, Monitor Your Energy Consumption in the Cloud, starts with the use of the same cloud service that was used in Chapter 4, Weather Station in the Cloud with Xively. However, in this case, we are going to send energy consumption data to the cloud. This way, you will be able to monitor data directly from the Xively interface.

Chapter 6, Hack a Commercial Home Automation Device, explores the idea of doing things differently. Instead of creating a new home automation system based on Arduino, we are going to hack an existing device so that you can control it from your computer. We are going to build a USB-controlled power switch, so you can control any device right from an interface running on your computer.

Chapter 7, Build Your Own Home Automation System, goes one step further and shows you how to build your own home automation system based on Arduino. We'll cover how to build an Arduino system from scratch, how to design your own PCB, and finally how to design and 3D print a custom case for your project.

You will need several hardware and software components to create all the projects found in this book. Of course, you can just read the description of the projects and learn this way. However, I really recommend actually doing the projects to really learn about building your own home automation systems based on Arduino.

The hardware components required are detailed at the beginning of each chapter. However, what you will really need for all the projects is an Arduino board. All the projects of the book are based on the Arduino Uno board, which is described in the following URL:

http://arduino.cc/en/Main/arduinoBoardUno

On the software part, there are some software that we will use in all chapters of the book. These are as follows:

Make sure that the server is running at this point. We are going to use it in several of the projects of this book.

This book is for all those who are willing to build their own home automation systems based on Arduino. You actually don't need to know anything about the Arduino platform beforehand, since all the projects will be explained step-by-step with clear instructions. The only thing you need in order to follow the projects found in this book is basic knowledge of electronics and programming.

This book is also for electronics hobbyists who want to learn more about doing projects with the Arduino platform. By doing these projects around home automation, you will learn about every aspect of the Arduino platform: how to interface sensors and actuators with Arduino, how to use wireless modules, and even how to build your own Arduino system from scratch.

Finally, this book is also for people willing to learn more about the Internet of Things using Arduino. Nearly all the chapters of the book include wireless communications, and two chapters of the book are dedicated to sending some data to the cloud so that it can be monitored from anywhere.

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, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "What we are interested in is the return_value field, which contains the result of the digitalRead() function."

A block of code is set as follows:

String data = "";
data = data + timeString + "," + String(temperature) + "," + String(humidity) + "," + String(lightLevel);

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

[default]
if (client) {
  // Process request
  process(client);

  // Close connection and free resources.
  client.stop();
}

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

# /digital/7/1

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: "On Windows, you can find it by navigating to Control Panel | Network and Internet | View network status and sharing options."

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