Controlling your coffee machine from the cloud

In this first recipe of this chapter, we are going to learn how to control a coffee machine from anywhere in the world. Of course, it could be any other appliance, such as a lamp or an oven. We are going to see how to connect the coffee machine to the Arduino MKR1000 board, and then how to connect the board to a cloud dashboard so it can easily be controlled remotely.

Getting ready

Let's first see how to connect the Arduino board to the coffee machine, or to any home appliance.

To do that, we are going to use a component called the PowerSwitch Tail, which can be used to control any appliance with Arduino. You can get this component from http://www.powerswitchtail.com/Pages/default.aspx.

You could, of course, also use a simple relay, but using the PowerSwitch Tail is much safer to connect electrical devices.

To connect the PowerSwitch Tail to Arduino, simply start by connecting the Vin+ pin of the PowerSwitch to Arduino pin 6, and then the two remaining...