Preface

Home automation is a topic that has been around for many years. It includes everything that you can imagine to control and automate your home. The most widely spread example is the alarm system of your home. Motion sensors, contact sensors, and the central device that orchestrates your alarm system are generally the main components of any home automation system.

There are countless devices that are available for home automation. You can buy complete home automation devices from a lot of stores, and even get them installed in your home. However, many of these systems are very expensive, impossible to be customized for your own needs, and have outdated user interfaces.

On the other hand, we have the Arduino platform. Arduino is a platform that you can use to quickly prototype electronic systems. It is now used by millions of people around the world to build more complex systems. It is actually the perfect platform to build home automation systems. Because of the flexibility of the Arduino platform, we are going to see that it is easy to interface with various sensors and actuators that are usually found in many home automation systems. It can also be interfaced with many wireless systems, such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or XBee.

In this book, we are going to see how to build home automation systems with Arduino. We will first build systems based on commercially available Arduino boards. For example, we are going to build a temperature sensor based on Arduino and Bluetooth. We are also going to integrate some of these systems in an Internet of Things perspective, by sending some data directly to a cloud service. Finally, we are also going to see how to hack commercially available devices and build your own home automation systems from scratch.