Who Should Read This Book

Programming Your Home is best suited to DIYers, programmers, and tinkerers who enjoy spending their leisure time building high-tech solutions to further automate their lives and impress their friends and family with their creations. Essentially, it is for those who generally enjoy creating custom technology and electronics solutions for their own personal living space.

A basic understanding of Arduino and programming languages like Ruby and Python are recommended but not required. You will learn how to combine these technologies in unique configurations to resolve homemaker annoyances and improve home management efficiencies.

In addition to the inclusion of Python scripts and Ruby on Rails-based web services, several of the projects call upon Google’s Android platform to help enhance the data event collection, visualization, and instantiation of activities. A basic familiarity with the Android SDK will be beneficial so that the projects that make use of the Android OS can offer a more mobile reach.

If you’re the type of person who prefers to build versus buy your home accessories, this book will further motivate you to use what you learned in the book as a starting point to expand upon and optimize them in various ways for their environment. Even though some of the topics deal with multiple software- and hardware-based solutions, they are easy to follow and inexpensive to build. Most of all, they show how a few simple ideas can transform a static analog environment into a smart digital one while having fun.