Chapter 8. Wrapping Up

Throughout the previous chapters, we looked at various tools and technologies used to build devices that will help us automate our homes. The earlier chapters should have given you a good introduction to the Raspberry Pi and Arduino technologies, which you can now expand upon.

In this chapter, we will review what you've learned, and then look at how you can grow your skills and start designing your own shields for the Raspberry Pi.

We will look at a Raspberry Pi prototyping shield. Then we will explore the GPIO pins of the Raspberry Pi so that we can interact with them via the shield. Next, we will look at the wiringPi library and the Gertboard, both of which can be used for home automation projects. Furthermore, we will look at some projects that use the techniques you've learned in this book. In some cases, we will build upon previous projects. Finally, we wrap up with a look into the future.

In order to complete the prototype board task, you will need:

• The Raspberry...

A brief review of the second edition of Raspberry Pi Home Automation with Arduino

Those of you who read the first edition of this book may have noticed some changes. We hope these have provided you with some new and exciting projects. For first time readers, we hope these changes have whetted your appetite for learning more.

Here is an overview of the topics covered in each chapter, with some of the differences from the first edition:

Chapter 1, An Introduction to the Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and Home Automation, and Chapter 2, Getting Started – Setting Up Your Raspberry Pi and Arduino, provided you with some background on the Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and the Cooking Hacks shield. We saw that we can take a third-party shield and attach it to the Raspberry Pi. This provided us with the ability to control devices hooked up to the shield (via the Raspberry Pi's GPIO pins), as we would with an Arduino microcontroller. In the second edition of the book, we looked at the Arduino in more detail, and...

Next steps

We have refreshed ourselves on the subjects covered so far. Let's look at future projects that you can try. These will provide you with a few ideas on how you can expand existing projects and provide some starting points to build your own ideas from scratch.

First, we'll review the prototyping Pi Plate. Then we will look at the Gertboard and its background. Finally, we'll provide some ideas for future projects that could use the Cooking Hacks shield, Gertboard, Arduino or the prototype shield.

The prototyping Pi Plate

The Raspberry Pi prototyping Pi Plate shield is a kit provided by Adafruit Industries. You can find out more about it at http://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-prototyping-pi-plate/overview. It allows you to create a prototyping shield that connects to the GPIO pins on the Raspberry Pi. You may be familiar with this principle from the Cooking Hacks shield, which you used to build your previous projects. Unlike the Raspberry Pi to Arduino shield, this is a kit whose components...

Ideas for future projects

This book includes a variety of projects that provide tools to sense and automate your home environment. Armed with knowledge after completing these projects, you are now equipped with the skills to expand your existing projects and create exciting new devices. The following is list that provides some potential projects for the future.

Expanding the curtain automation tool to include temperature sensing

Your current application from Chapter 6, Curtain Automation – Open and Close the Curtains Based on the Ambient Light, uses light to decide when to open and close the blinds or curtains. You can now try combining the thermostat from Chapter 3, Central Air and Heating Thermostat, with the curtain control device and redevelop the software to incorporate temperature data. Using the thermistor, you can decide to open and close your blinds according to temperature changes in order to conserve heat.

By expanding the database written in Chapter 4, Temperature Storage – Setting...

The future of home automation

The Raspberry Pi and Arduino are two great technologies to create home automation projects. As they continue to grow, the tasks that we will be able to achieve at home using homebrew devices will grow even larger.

Let's take a look of some of the other tools that will become increasingly available to home enthusiasts.

3D printing

3D printing is a method of taking a three-dimensional image and then printing it in a substance such as plastic or metal. The advent of cheaper 3D printing has provided home automation enthusiasts with a new tool for their arsenal. 3D printing's ability to create custom cases and brackets for devices, and then print these in plastic provides a gateway to a whole new world of exciting designs.

Printers such as the Makerbot have opened up 3D printing to the home market. For those who can't afford a 3D printer at home, there are services such as Shapeways (http://www.shapeways.com/), which allows the customer to upload a 3D image to the website...

Summary

The Raspberry Pi and Arduino platforms are inexpensive computers with a lot of potential. By choosing these technologies, you have provided yourself with a fantastic tool set to build home automation projects.

In this book, we aimed to provide you with examples that are useful and slowly build up in difficulty, expanding your knowledge of the Raspberry Pi, Arduino, Linux, and related technologies along the way.

Our projects covered the application of the Raspberry Pi in home automation, and showed you how you can leverage the existing Arduino toolset to augment the Raspberry Pi's abilities. As newer and more powerful versions are released, we believe the future for this technology is, indeed, very bright.

Note

The Raspberry Pi community is growing by the day, and the best place to share your projects and look for help is at the Raspberry Pi website forum, at http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/.

The Arduino community is well established and, like the Raspberry Pi website, has a lively forum...