Gertboard

Raspberry Pi Home Automation with Arduino

IOTHome 2 Comments

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.

Book update

IOTHome Leave a comment

Just a quick update on the book. It is currently going through the pre-final proof reading stage where hopefully we will weed out any typos!

Once I have a confirmed release date I will include those details here – we are looking at around the end of February for it hitting the stores I would guess though.

For anyone that buys it and has comments or questions you can use this blog as a medium to contact me.

A quick update

IOTHome Leave a comment

Just a quick post with some updates:

Commercial Home Automation

There are a number of products out in the market I;d like to give a test run and review here. I’ve listed a couple of these below. Unlike X10 these devices use web based techology.

Iris

Lowes have launched their own home automation tools known as Iris. You can see a variety of the devices here:

http://www.lowes.com/cd_Iris_239939199_

WeMo

Like Lowes Belkin aso have their own home automation devices under the WeMo brand:

http://www.belkin.com/us/wemo

dd-wrt

I’ve been experimenting with dd-wrt using a spare wireless router I have at home. It’s a great piece of software and allows you to turn a second wireless router into a bridge-relay for your existing network. I think I will actually end up using it for creating a second more secure network for running my home automation devices over. I can then use the existing wi-fi network for regular surfing, netflix etc.

http://www.dd-wrt.com/site/index

Gertboard

So after a long wait the Gertboard has finally arrived. It is in kit-form so I’ll be spending some time soldering the components together. Keep your eyes peeled for further updates on this!

 

Gertboard Kit

Gertboard Kit

 

Quick updates

IOTHome Leave a comment

Gertboards

For those of you not familiar with it, the Gertboard is a microcontroller kit for the Raspberry Pi that comes with a variety of add ons (motors, sensors etc.)

It hasn’t shipped in the US yet, however I have pre-ordered it and will be doing a review once the equipment arrives.

In the meantime you can read more about it at the Element14 site.

Potential book

As a result of this blog there is the potential for a book in the works, more on this when/if it develops further.

Punching cable

I recently got a crash course in punching cable and wiring up Cat 5 and phone cable. There is a post in the works on this, where I will explain the relevance for home automation.