Donald Norris - The Internet of Things Do-It-Yourself at Home Projects for Arduino, Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone Black

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This book is dedicated to my wonderful parents, Harry and Esther Norris,
who provided the love and support to enable me to become the person that I am today.
I would also like to dedicate the book to my inspiring high school physics teacher, Mr. Bluhm, who instilled in me a love for science, especially physics, that still burns within me.

Donald Norris has a degree in electrical engineering and an MBA with a specialization in production management. He is currently teaching both undergraduate and graduate IT courses at Southern New Hampshire University. He has also created and taught several robotics courses there. He has over 30 years of teaching experience as an adjunct professor at a variety of colleges and universities.

Mr. Norris retired from civilian government service with the U.S. Navy, where he specialized in acoustics related to nuclear submarines and associated advanced digital signal processing. Since then, he has spent more than 20 years as a professional software developer using C, C#, C++, Python, and Java, as well as 5 years as a certified IT security consultant.

Mr. Norris started a consultancy, Norris Embedded Software Solutions (dba NESS LLC, www.nessllc.net), that specializes in developing application solutions using microprocessors and microcontrollers. He likes to think of himself as a perpetual hobbyist and geek and is always trying out new approaches and out-of-the-box experiments. He is a licensed private pilot, active member of the Civil Air Patrol, photography buff, amateur radio operator, and avid runner.

He is also the author of two other McGraw-Hill Tab books Raspberry Pi Projects for the Evil Genius and Build Your Own Quadcopter.

P roject books such as this one are never created in a vacuum. They are a product of the authors insight, creativeness, and most important, an integration of the vast resources available in the open-source community. I have tried to be true to the spirit of open source and acknowledge all the fine contributions to the technology that I have incorporated into this book. I humbly apologize if Ive missed someones contribution.

I also wish to acknowledge the fine support and encouragement that I have received and continue to receive from my colleagues at Southern New Hampshire University. This books content is also presented in a new undergraduate IT course, which reflects SNHUs innovative spirit.

I suppose the genesis of this book was from long-term interest in connecting computers to the Internet. Back in the early 1990s, I experimented with a variety of single-board computers that would connect, in a fashion, to the Internet and serve up relatively simple web pages. They didnt have the sophistication or capabilities of todays single-board systems exemplified by the Raspberry Pi or the BeagleBone Black boards. But they worked and provided useful platforms to experiment using simple computing devices in lieu of full-scale PC-based servers or desktop clients. Roll forward almost twenty years and there are now quite a few highly capable and functional systems, which can easily fulfill the promise of the Internet of Things, or IoT for short. I describe the IoT in the first chapter in yet another attempt at defining a somewhat nebulous phrase, which truly means different things to different people. I also took a somewhat different approach with this IoT book in that I used three separate platforms to implement the various demonstration projects. My initial thought was to demonstrate how one platform could have strengths in one area while another would be better suited to another area. However, what I found was that the platforms had much more in common than they were different. In fact, the Raspberry Pi and the BeagleBone Black boards are just about identical from a software prospective. Let me now present a glimpse into what awaits you in this book.