Book Image

Building Wireless Sensor Networks Using Arduino

By : Matthijs Kooijman
Book Image

Building Wireless Sensor Networks Using Arduino

By: Matthijs Kooijman

Overview of this book

Arduino has been established as the de facto standard microcontroller programming platform, being used for one-off do-it-yourself projects as well as prototypes for actual products. By providing a myriad of libraries, the Arduino community has made it very easy to interact with pretty much any piece of hardware out there. XBee offers a great range of low-power wireless solutions that are easy to work with, by taking all of the complexity of wireless (mesh) networking out of your hands and letting you focus on what to send without worrying about the how. Building wireless sensor networks is cost-effective as well as efficient as it will be done with Arduino support. The book starts with a brief introduction to various wireless protocols, concepts, and the XBee hardware that enables their use. Then the book expands to explain the Arduino boards to you, letting them read and send sensor data, collect that data centrally, and then even control your home from the Internet. Moving further more advanced topics such as interacting through the standard Zigbee Home Automation protocol, or making your application power-efficient are covered. By the end of the book, you will have all the tools needed to build complete, real-world solutions.
Table of Contents (8 chapters)

Controlling your heating and/or cooling system

To make a working thermostat, you will need some way to let it control the temperature in your house. One way to approach this is to let an Arduino replace your existing thermostat and have it control the HVAC (heating, ventilation and/or air conditioning) system in your house in the same way the thermostat did. Alternatively, you could have your network control mains power to a device, such as an electrical heater or standalone air conditioning unit, and control the room temperature through that.

Ideally, you could toggle heating or cooling for each room in your house separately. Combined with a temperature sensor in each room, you would have detailed control over the temperature in every room of your house.

For simplicity, these examples assume that you will control the heating using a single on/off switch for the entire house. If you (instead or additionally) want to control cooling, the examples will be easy to modify. If you have a way...