Home Automation With The Raspberry Pi

The book I read to research this post was Home Automation With The Raspberry Pi by Marco Schwartz which is a very good book that I think I downloaded from kindle. This book provides various projects that each build on what you learn about the Raspberry Pi. You gradually improve your expertise. The raspberry is frequently used in home automation projects and provides an inexpensive option to a computer. Often it is used in conjunction with an arduino which is similar but has more interfaces. There is an operating system available for it available at http://raspberrypi.org. It is a good idea to know a little about basic javascript before using it and there is a plug in called node.ns you can use with it. The projects in the book are pretty self explanatory. It can be connected to Twitter to provide online data like if the temperature drops below a certain amount. It can also work with some cloud computing services. There is a program called xively that enables it to record things like temperature. There is 2 main versions A & B with the latter having more USB ports and more connectivity. Either version can be used with the projects in this book. A major attraction of the Raspberry Pi is you can buy it for around £30 and extras in general are quite inexpensive. There is also a open source standard for hardware it will work with. This book is around 75 pages so is quite short. I enjoyed reading this book and recommend it for anyone interested in learning a bit more about the Raspberry Pi.