Home Automation with Arduino: Automate your Home using Open-Source Hardware Paperback – July 30, 2013

Marco has captured the very core of what open sourcing and prototyping is all about. His instructions are accurate and straight forward. Anyone with an interest in automation, security and energy efficiency can gain practical usable knowledge and skill from Marco's examples. A must read for every smart DIY homeowner. Highly recommended reading!

Overall enjoyed this book although it may be difficult to follow, for beginners, in the latter chapters as details are skipped. Up to the those chapters this book really does a great job guiding a reader through the steps of setting up some simple circuits that can lead to much more complex projects. I particularly enjoyed the chapter that guides the reader through setting up a real-time web monitoring system -- highly valuable in my opinion.Billed as a book for beginners, the book starts off doing a great job and really covers a lot of topics. Unfortunately the book fails in two respects to continue teaching beginners the basics. First, it leaps from beginner topics to advanced without any bridge, this is especially evident with some of the schematics that aren't explained and are a little difficult to follow. Secondly, the book refers to some electronic components that are not available through the links provided on their website and are difficult to find in general with no mention of replacement parts.Overall, even if this book makes a leap to far for some, the parts that are manageable are great. I would recommend keeping this book in your library to refer back to when your skills improve as well as using as a primer for beginners.

Easy and staight forward read. Not much detail that get in the way of understanding the concepts but it's not a complete design to automate your home. It more here are the things that you need to put together a automated system.

It is a good book to get started with home automation. I am the type that likes to tinker with things.

This book lays out how you can get your Arduino and your computer/internet working together to control and read sensors.Each chapter has code examples you can repeat. It would be nice to have them downloadable, but re-typing does help you learn.The introduction of Python is an interesting twist to using only Processing for the Arduino, and a necessary one in order to communicate with your Arduino from your computer and ultimately the internet.The Python is really the only reason I did not give it 5 stars. I know it is a necessary component in order to get everything to work, and Marco does a good job in giving you resources to work with and install Python. But as a complete newbie to Python, I had trouble installing and understanding the most rudimentary operations of Python. I eventually found a tutorial on Adafruit that helped me to install Python on my computer. A little more hand holding thru installing, coding and using an ide would be more than helpful even though it's really somewhat out of the scope of the book.I especially enjoyed how to actually manufacture your own PCB, and the whole process Marco takes you on was logical and progressive with easy to follow code samples, and careful annotation about what each line does.

Not very much in it that I could not find by searching the Internet. Did not clearly explain software development side.

What I've been able to check out so far, it seems to be a very good book.

The table of contents sounded really good. After getting the book and looking at the projects I realized there was really only one new project that was web enabled. Most of the info is available online for free at places like Sparkfun and Adafruit.