Take control of your home! Automate home appliances and lighting, and learn about Arduinos and Android smartphones. Create applications that leverage ideas from this and other exciting new platforms.
In Programming Your Home, technology enthusiast Mike Riley walks you through a variety of custom home automation projects, ranging from a phone application that alerts you to package deliveries at your front door to an electronic guard dog that will prevent unwanted visitors.
Open locked doors using your smartphone. Assemble a bird feeder that posts Twitter tweets to tell you when the birds are feeding or when bird seed runs low. Have your home speak to you when you receive email or tell you about important events such as the arrival of visitors, and much more!
You'll learn how to use Android smartphones, Arduinos, X10 controllers and a wide array of sensors, servos, programming languages, web frameworks and mobile SDKs. Programming Your Home is written for smartphone programmers, web developers, technology tinkerers, and anyone who enjoys building cutting-edge, Do-It-Yourself electronic projects.
This book will give you the inspiration and understanding to construct amazing automation capabilities that will transform your residence into the smartest home in your neighborhood!
What You Need:
To get the most out of Programming Your Home, you should have some familiarity with the Arduino hardware platform along with a passion for tinkering. You should enjoy innovative thinking and learning exercises as well as have some practical application development experience. The projects use a variety of hardware components including sensors and actuators, mobile devices, and wireless radios, and we'll even tell you where you can get them.
Q&A with Programming Your Home author Mike Riley
Q: Why did your write Programming Your Home?
A: I wanted to show people with little or no experience with programming micro controllers how to empower themselves with the ability to automate their own homes. Seeing the completed, working project brings a wonderful sense of accomplishment.
Q: How many home automation projects are featured in the book?
A: Programming Your Home features 8 unique projects, ranging from a water level alerting system to a voice synthesized interactive application to control and report on the variety of projects constructed throughout the book.
Q: Which is your favorite project from the book?
A: The Android Door Lock is a my personal favorite, but it's also one of the most complex in the book. I also enjoyed building and using the Tweeting Bird Feeder. It's a thrill to watch tweets appear in a Twitter feed when birds are perching on the feeder, or when the feeder bird seed needs to be refilled.
Q: Do the projects cost a lot of money to build?
A: Not at all. That's a big reason why home automation is so compelling today. Most of the projects cost less than sixty dollars to assemble, and much of the hardware is reusable in other projects, driving the material costs down even further.
Q: How long does it take to build a typical project from the book?
A: Most of the projects can be assembled and operational within an hour or two.
Q: What can I do with the projects after I finished building them?
A: Each chapter has a 'Next Steps' section that encourages you to extend each project in novel and highly customized ways. After reading the book, you will have the knowledge and experience necessary to build upon the projects or create your own that automate aspects of your home in your own unique way.
Top Five Home Automation Tips
1) Start Small. While it would be cool for your home to behave like a scene out of a science fiction movie, building such an elaborate configuration will take a lot of time, effort and money. Try a couple small, easy projects first to get an idea of what to expect, how it behaves, and what needs to be modified to work optimally for your needs.
2) Search YouTube. Creating a nifty home automation project is a badge of honor, worthy of showing off to the world. And what better place to show off these accomplishments in action. Searching combined keywords like Arduino, Home, and Automation will return a number of short videos demonstrating a variety of inspiring ideas.
3) Ask an Engineer. DIY Electronics vendor Adafruit, along with a number of other DIY sites like Sparkfun and Element14, have experienced electronics engineers on staff and/or in the product forums ready to help. In the case of Adafruit, they even have a weekly live broadcast that gives customers a chance to freely ask Adafruit founder Limor 'LadyAda' Fried for her expert technical advice.
4) Be Safe. While most home automation projects don't call upon radical amounts of electrical current to operate, electricity can still be very dangerous if not handled with respect and understanding the risks. When in doubt, call upon the expertise of an experienced electrician before manipulating anything having to do with home electrical wiring.
5) Have Fun! In addition to capturing the obvious benefits of home automation aspects that will make your life easier, the other, larger reward is the actual building of the project itself. This is especially meaningful if you build it with your family, so that each time your project activates, you have the satisfaction of recalling the joy and wonder on the faces of your loved ones witnessing the working assembly for the first time.
K-Pasta
Posted May 10, 2012
Programming Your Home by Mike Riley is an interesting book that allows one without thorough background knowledge to be able to easily pick up. His step by step instructions allow a coherent understanding of the project from the start of the build to implementing the design.
Some of the guides inside the book include the Android Door Lock and a Web-Enabled Light Switch, which both in my opinion are very interesting and fun DIY projects. Riley does a nice job separating each project with detailed steps so the mix of gathering the parts, programming the software, and then implementing the hardware are seamlessly combined.
This book has about 10 projects, but the steps and guides throughout this book will allow you to gain experience in order to build future projects on your own. I recommend this book to those who enjoy home DIY projects as well as wanting to make their house more technologically integrated. Overall, nice format, detailed steps, easy instructions, awesome projects.
Overview
Take control of your home! Automate home appliances and lighting, and learn about Arduinos and Android smartphones. Create applications that leverage ideas from this and other exciting new platforms.
In Programming Your Home, technology enthusiast Mike Riley walks you through a variety of custom home automation projects, ranging from a phone application that alerts you to package deliveries at your front door to an electronic guard dog that ...