What you need for this book

You will need several hardware and software components to create all the projects found in this book. Of course, you can just read the description of the projects and learn this way. However, I really recommend actually doing the projects to really learn about building your own home automation systems based on Arduino.

The hardware components required are detailed at the beginning of each chapter. However, what you will really need for all the projects is an Arduino board. All the projects of the book are based on the Arduino Uno board, which is described in the following URL:

http://arduino.cc/en/Main/arduinoBoardUno

On the software part, there are some software that we will use in all chapters of the book. These are as follows:

• Arduino IDE (http://arduino.cc/en/main/software).
• You will need several libraries. These are detailed in each chapter where they are necessary.
• You will also need a web server running on your computer for some of the projects. I recommend using some software that integrates a web server and a database and that handles all the details for you.

  If you are using Windows, I recommend using EasyPHP. You can download it from the following URL:

  http://www.easyphp.org/

  For OS X, I recommend using MAMP. You can download it from the following URL:

  http://www.mamp.info/

  For Linux, you can follow the instructions given in the following URL to install a web server:

  http://doc.ubuntu-fr.org/lamp

Make sure that the server is running at this point. We are going to use it in several of the projects of this book.