In Chapter 6, Building a Chronotherm for Home Automation, we explored the definition of home automation and, one step after another, we built a prototype capable of controlling a boiler programmatically according to user preferences. We extended this prototype, providing a preset configuration for storing different temperature schedules and also improving the user interaction through voice recognition and synthesis.

This time, we're enhancing the Chronotherm application with another feature that makes use of network capabilities to collect data from the Internet. The goal of this chapter is to make our prototype capable of reacting to external events that can't be easily caught by connected sensors.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics: