To get the most out of this book

This book has been written for beginners, so in terms of knowledge, there are no prerequisites. As for the hardware, you will need all the hardware devices listed in the following table in order to follow along and build projects with me. In terms of software requirements, you will need the Raspberry Pi Imager software (available for all three major operating systems) to create flashed SD cards for your Pi (it even supports SD card formatting), Wireshark on the Raspberry Pi OS to dissect the MQTT control packets, and Node-RED as a dashboard interface for our projects, also to be installed on Raspberry Pi OS.

If you are using the digital version of this book, we advise you to type the code yourself or access the code from the book’s GitHub repository (a link is available in the next section). Doing so will help you avoid any potential errors related to the copying and pasting of code.