Mike Riley - Programming Your Home: Automate with Arduino, Android, and Your Computer

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This book is dedicated to Bill, Eileen, and Josie.

I have been a lifelong tinkerer. My earliest recollection of dissecting my fathers broken tape recorder instilled an appreciation for the technology that drove it. From there, erector sets, model railroads, and programmable calculators led to personal computers, mobile devices, and microcontrollers. Over the years, this passion for learning not only how stuff works but also how technical concepts can be remixed with surprising, often highly satisfying results has been liberating. Thats why this book was such a joy for me to write.

Helping others to see whats possible by observing their surroundings and having the desire to take an active role in making their lives easier with technology while having fun is this books primary goal. Yet without others helping me distill my ideas into what you are reading now, this book would not have been possible. It is to them that I wish to express my deepest gratitude for their support.

A boatload of thanks goes to the books editor, Jackie Carter, who spent countless hours ensuring that my words were constructed with clarity and precision. Copy editor Molly McBeath did a fantastic job catching hidden (from my view anyway) typos and grammatical misconstructions. Big thanks to Susannah Pfalzer for her infectious enthusiasm and boundless boosts of encouragement and to Arduino expert and fellow Pragmatic author Maik Schmidt, whose own success helped pave the way for a book like this.

Many thanks also go to John Winans, tech wiz extraordinaire, who refactored the state machine code used in several of the projects, as well as to Sven Davies, Mike Bengtson, Jon Bearscove, Kevin Gisi, Michael Hunter, Jerry Kuch, Preston Patton, and Tony Williamitis for helping to make this book as technically accurate and complete as it is. Shout-outs also go to Jon Erikson and Jon Kurz for their enthusiastic encouragement. I also want to thank Bob Cochran and Jim Schultz for providing wonderfully helpful feedback during the books beta period. Thanks also go to Philip Aaberg for filling my ears with music to code by. And to the makers of and contributors to the Arduino and Fritzing projects, you people have changed the world for the better.

I am most grateful to my wife, Marinette, and my family for allowing me to tunnel away for months in my mythical man cave to complete this book. And I cant gush enough over the wonderful pencil illustrations that my daughter drew for the book. I am so proud of you, Marielle!

Finally, I am sincerely thankful to Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt for their passion and vision. Youre the best.

Welcome to the exciting, empowering world of home automation! If you have ever wanted your home to do more than just protect you against the outside elements and want to interface it to the digital domain, this book will show you how. By demonstrating several easy-to-build projects, you will be able to take the skills you learned from this book and expand upon and apply them toward custom home automation projects of your own design.

The books primary objective is to get you excited about the broader possibilities for home automation and instill the confidence you need to ultimately build upon these and your own ideas. The projects also make great parent-child learning activities, as the finished products instill a great sense of accomplishment. And who knows? Your nifty home automation creations may even change the world and become a huge new business opportunity for other homeowners actively seeking an automation solution that saves them time and money.