In this chapter, we provided an overview of the Raspberry Pi and Arduino platform. We also looked at some of the existing technologies used in home automation and their history. While Sutherland's ECHO IV filled a room in his house, the Raspberry Pi occupies space not much larger than a credit card.

Home automation now seems to be taking the next step to becoming widely adopted, and the Raspberry Pi neatly fits into this world by providing those who want to customize control of their devices with an easy and a cheap tool to achieve it, and also by expanding what can be done with Arduino technology currently out in the marketplace.

With this in mind, we will get started on our first project—setting up the Raspberry Pi. Here, we will install the necessary software to get our Raspberry Pi up and running, and install the Arduino IDE so that we can program our Arduino Uno.