Programming Your Home

What You Need

Since this will be our first outdoor project, the equipment costs are more expensive for several reasons. First, unless you are willing to drill holes through your walls or leave a window or door open to run an Ethernet cable to the feeder, we will need an untethered way to broadcast sensor events. Fortunately, a low-power and relatively low-cost option exists in the form of XBee radios. While these take a little extra effort to configure initially, they are fairly reliable, easy to communicate with, and don’t require much attention once operational.

Second, while we could use the standard size Arduino Uno (as shown in the wiring diagrams throughout this chapter), it might prove to be too long and/or too wide to conveniently ...