Chapter 1, An Introduction to the Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and Home Automation, introduces the technologies used in the book and provides a conceptual background to the world of home automation.

Chapter 2, Getting Started – Setting Up Your Raspberry Pi and Arduino, is a guide to your Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and the Cooking Hacks Raspberry Pi to Arduino bridge shield.

Chapter 3, Central Air and Heating Thermostat, teaches you how to build a thermostat using the Arduino platform to control your central air conditioning and heating.

Chapter 4, Temperature Storage – Setting Up a Database to Store Your Results, shows you how to build a database to store your projects' data, and explore it via your web browser.

Chapter 5, Parcel Delivery Detector, demonstrates a system using Arduino and Raspberry Pi that will alert you whenever a parcel arrives at your door.

Chapter 6, Curtain Automation – Open and Close the Curtains Based on the Ambient Light, teaches you how to integrate motors with your projects to open and close blinds and curtains using the skills learned in previous chapters.

Chapter 7, Water/Damp Detection – Check for Damp/Flooding in Sheds and Basements, helps you build systems that can check for humidity and water to indicate dampness and flooding.

Chapter 8, Wrapping Up, finishes the topic with some ideas for future projects.

Appendix, References, lists a collection of links to the resources used in this book and other interesting information.

If you are new to Raspberry Pi, Arduino, or home automation, and you wish to develop some amazing projects using these tools, then this book is for you. Any experience in using the Linux operating system or Raspberry Pi will be an added advantage.

This book is a step-by-step guide that will help you in setting up components and software in each chapter.

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 explanations of their meanings.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Once logged in, we are going to run apt-get to install SQLite3."

A block of code is set as follows:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import sqlite3
import urllib2
import json

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

cd ~
mkdir database
cd database

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "If you see the Getting darker message, try shining your flashlight on the sensor."

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