Month: February 2013

Raspberry Pi Home Automation with Arduino

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So the book has finally been published!

Raspberry Pi Home Automation with Arduino - book cover

Raspberry Pi Home Automation with Arduino

The title is: Raspberry Pi Home Automation with Arduino and it is available from Packt publishing at the following URL:

http://www.packtpub.com/raspberry-pi-home-automation-with-arduino/book

 

A bit about the book

Raspberry Pi Home Automation with Arduino is a basic introductory guide for using your Raspberry Pi technology and the Arduino Open Source framework, for building small home automation projects. The book will walk you through the basics of getting setup, trying out some basic electronic components such as photo-resistors and DC motors and building some introductory projects.

I’ve tried to keep the book accessible to beginners and steered clear of anything too complex. Once you are comfortable with the material in the book you’ll be able to move onto the more challenging projects.

Some of the topics covered in the book include:

  • Install an operating system for your Raspberry Pi
  • Set up the Raspberry Pi and Arduino bridge shield
  • Learn how to work with electronic components to build small circuits
  • Develop applications that interact with your circuits
  • Use thermistors and photoresistors to monitor and control your surroundings
  • Control your own mains power with a relay shield and even connect a motor to your Raspberry Pi

Cooking Hacks shield 

Due to delays in the Gertboard shipping, when originally writing the book I found an excellent replacement for this component. This is the Cooking Hacks Raspberry Pi to Arduino connection bridge shield, which can be found here.

As you may have seen in some of my earlier posts I have given some video examples on the bridge shield being used to connect a Arduino Relay and Arduino Motor shield to the Raspberry Pi.

I would recommend checking this component out if you plan to do any home automation projects with your Raspberry Pi and want to re-use existing Arduino shields.

Wrap-up

If you have any question or queries feel free to post them here. If you spot any Errata (yes the dreaded typo as well) you can send through a correction form here.

Winter storm Nemo

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So we got slammed last night with over a couple of feet of snow. Down the road in Milford CT snow topped out at 38″.

Snow drifts thanks to the wind last night have resulted in huge snow banks, and most of the roads around here are shut with three feet of snow.

Here is a photo of the snow build up outside our front door. Using the tape measure the snow bank came in at over 40 inches.

Front door

Snow build up

Snow build up

Since we are currently snowed in and waiting for the plow trucks to clear the road, today is a great day to work on some projects. I’m going to be comparing the difference between building curtain automation devices using a stepper motor and a regular DC motor.

There is also a post in the works on using processing to design a layout of your home that can be used for displaying sensor data.

Finally a post is also in the works about the recently released book.