In this chapter, we looked at what an SD card is, setting it up to use it with the Raspberry Pi, installing an operating system, and loading our Raspberry Pi for the first time. We also downloaded the Arduino IDE and uploaded a test sketch to ensure that our setup was correct. In future chapters, we will cover the IDE in depth. Finally, we took a brief look at the Arduino to Raspberry Pi connection bridge in preparation for future projects and touched upon the arduPi library.

Now that we have our hardware in place, we can take a look at our first project—building a central air and heating thermostat. In this project, which will be in the next chapter, we will be using an Arduino Uno along with a relay and thermistor to control a central heating or cooling device such as a boiler, furnace, or central air conditioning system.