Mike Riley’s entry in The Pragmatic Programmers series, Programming Your Home – automating with Arduino, Android, and your computer – was a lot of fun.
While I am not really in a position to do many of the mini projects given in the book (wrong type of house plus we rent), reading some of the project ideas did give me some inspiration for other activities. One of those is a Buffer-like tool I’m now writing to queue tweets over-and-above what the free level of Buffer will allow (and on a different schedule from my Buffer-fed queue). In conjunction with python-twitter, cron, and simple email messages, I’ve got a system started to which I can email things I would like to be posted, and they will go out when the cron job runs.
The Arduino is an impressive embedded platform – one that has also rekindled another long-time interest I’ve had in robotics. Years back, I recall seeing Sally Struthers advertising for one of those learn-at-home groups, and one of the options was robotics. (By “years back”, I mean 20+ years ago – probably more like 25 years ago, at this point.) I used to own a copy of Robot Builder’s Bonanza – and read it cover-to-cover a couple times. I loved watching Battlebots on TV. I’ve always wanted to buy/use LEGO Mindstorms.
Using robots to automate daily activities (and, of course, for fun) has been a fascination since I first saw Lost In Space and myriad other scifi shows and movies.
Riley does a great job of not demanding you be an expert programmer (or even a programmer at all) with the fully-implemented code examples in the book. He also does a good job of indicating what you’ll likely have to tweak on your own – and what you can probably just leave alone in the examples. Add to this the “extra credit challenges”, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in home automation, embedded development, robotics, or just general programming/scripting.
There are some other interesting Python snippets throughout the book – that don’t have to be used in the context of an Arduino (like using Google’s SMTP server (via authentication)).