Just starting, EXTREMELY confused.

Other Hardware Home Automation
1

Good morning everyone.. I have recently began to get interested in learning a bit of electronics and maybe getting into a bit of home automation. I am currently a programmer/DBA and would like to get more experience with electronics.. I am Extremely confused on exactly what I need, and have a habbit of overbuying and wasting quite a bit of money...

In the long term, I would like to build a home automation system and slowly grow it - maybe starting with something simple like controlling my blinds in the house, or adjusting the tempature in the house. I would like to controll it all from some sort of connected web page, or C# Application I could write - but I dont understand what I need to buy to begin...

I have seen http://blog.startingelectronics.com/?p=546 which describes how to use a Arduino as a web server, and thats very close to what I'm looking for - but I could just use one of my laptops or home PC as the webserver so I'm not sure if I need everything mentioned, or what specifically I do not need..

With that background in mind, could someone point me to a "Beginners" pack of some sort that would allow me to monitor the temp and report it to a local server of some sort?

I am very sorry if I did not ask in the correct area, and If I did not provide enough details (Or has been asked before!) I searched but did not find anything specific (Which would just be my lack of knowledge)..

Thank you again.

2

There is some server stuff included in the examples.

You don't need a pack, you just need a Mega, a sensor, and an Ethernet shield. You are bound to need other stuff eventually, but don't rush it.

3

Is a Ethernet shield what connects it to the network? (I would think "SHIELD" would prevent?)

4

Yes, but it's best not to quibble about the terminology.

Arduinos typically form the base of a mechanical system where shields for different purposes can be stacked thereon and share common pins and power. A typical Ethernet shield also includes a micro SD card slot. I guess, if you want one, you usually want the other.

You can also make your own.

5

Take a look here: desert home. There are plenty of blog posts there showing the evolution of an arduino based system for monitoring home power utilization & temperature data - later pool controller etc etc. Eventually, the web serving/controller piece moved to a raspberry pi.

I have a simple system measuring temp & humidity using an uno & wifi that pushes the data to a LAMP server for graphing. xBee's another possibility for the transport as you'll see on Dave's site above.

If I hadn't had the LAMP server already in place, I think I'd have gone with a Pi solution serve up the web pages - more power and space to run a fancier web site, but still cheap.