Hardware and software requirements

The first thing you will need for this project is an Arduino Uno board.

Then, you need a BLE module. We chose the Adafruit nRF8001 chip because it comes with a nice Arduino library, and it already has existing examples of Android apps to control the module. This is the same module that we used in the previous chapter.

For the sensors, I chose a DHT11 sensor to measure the temperature and the ambient humidity. DHT11 is a digital temperature and humidity sensor that is really easy to integrate with Arduino. There are several solutions available for Arduino, but this sensor was chosen because it is one of the easiest to interface with Arduino. To make the sensor work with Arduino, we will also need a 4.7K Ohm resistor.

We will also use a photocell in series with a 10K Ohm resistor to measure the ambient light level. The photocell is basically a resistor that will change its resistance depending on the incoming light on the cell. It will be connected to the...