Programming Your Home: Automate with Arduino, Android, and Your Computer

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.

Top Five Home Automation Tips

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Table of Contents

Part I—Preparations
1. Getting Started
2. Requirements

Part II—Projects
3. Water Level Notifier
4. Electric Guard Dog
5. Tweeting Bird Feeder
6. Package Delivery Detector
7. Web-Enabled Light Switch
8. Curtain Automation
9. Android Door Lock
10. Giving Your Home a Voice

Part III—Predictions
11. Future Designs
12. More Project Ideas

Part IV—Appendices
A1. Installing Arduino Libraries
A2. Bibliography