9.7 Next Steps

Congratulations! You have just completed one of the most complex projects in this book. You have come a long way and acquired a great deal of knowledge and experience. You now have the ability to automate a variety of electrical devices in your own home. Our final project will combine a number of these techniques to create an application that will listen for a number of events and relay these to you via a text-to-speech interface. But before we get started, consider expanding your Android Door Lock with these additional features:

• Implement Steve Gibson’s Perfect Paper Passwords to provide a more secure, multifactor, one-time password authentication scheme.[104] By using the Perfect Paper Password approach, you will be able to share one-time use entry codes to anyone requiring secure access to your home, such as visiting health professionals, house cleaning service personnel, and maintenance workers.

• Connect a PIR sensor to the IOIO board to capture and transmit motion-detected events. While the current design does something similar, it can be problematic if entry to the target area is intentionally or unintentionally delayed. Take advantage of the numerous other analog and digital pins on the IOIO board and hook up a PIR sensor like the one we used in Chapter 4, ​Electric Guard Dog​.

• Attach more than one electric door lock to the IOIO Web Server program and access these locks via different URL paths. For example, open the front door by accessing http://192.168.1.230/frontdoor, and the cellar door via http://192.168.1.230/cellardoor.

• Go beyond just controlling door locks from an Android phone. Electrify lights, appliances, computers, and any other electrical device in your home via the IOIO web server. Expand the web server program on your Android phone to log events, email status updates, or detect orientation changes (i.e, someone or something moved the phone) via Android’s compass and accelerometer sensors.