In this chapter, we took a credit card-sized microcomputer no larger than a deck of playing cards and transformed it into a JavaFX Switch controller machine. Along the way, you learned about the Raspberry Pi, how to create a bootable SD card, how to install an operating system to it, how to configure it for best performance and remote connectivity, how to give it a fixed network (IP) address, and how to connect to the Pi from your development machine.

We also revisited how to install JDK 8/ JavaFX 8 to both the Raspberry Pi and your development machine, and you learned how to install and configure NetBeans on your development machine so that it can use the JDK on the Pi as a remote platform for debugging and execution.

With both your development machine and the Raspberry Pi ready for action, we discussed the principles needed to develop a simple but great application to control the outside world from the Raspberry Pi using JavaFX and a few select tools/APIs, including Pi4j, to control...