For many decades now it has been possible, even easy, to control home devices such as lights, thermostats, and appliances with automatic and remote controls. On the one hand, these automation devices save effort and energy, but on the other hand, even modest adjustments are inconvenient to final users because they need a good knowledge of the system to make any changes.

During the last few years, people were reluctant to adopt home automation technologies because of a lack of a standard or an easy-to-customize solution. Nowadays, things are changing and prototyping boards such as UDOO, play a great role during the design and the building of DIY (Do It Yourself) automated devices. Best of all, thanks to open source projects, these platforms are easy to extend and can be controlled by different devices, such as personal computers with web browsers, mobile phones, and tablets.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics: