SENSENSHOW
Larry Apolonio
September 26, 2015
This is a project that touches on topics that I have presentations and exhibitions for. The project name is a shortened phrase for sense and show – sensenshow.
If any project had a mission statement this would be the mission statement for this project
“To show people how to get into the maker culture using home automation as a platform for learning”
I want to stress that the purpose of this project is to learn, not home automation. I can foresee a point where this project may lead to interest that is more home automation than learning, but today the focus is learning.
Making your house smart will require a lot of different skills, but that provides an opportunity to learn different things.
· Arduino – I lot of the devices you will build will be based on the Arduino platform. There are different Arduino form factors, like the Uno, Leonardo, and Pro Mini. These are microcontrollers, and you program them directly. It is a hearty device and your journey into the maker world should begin here.
· Raspberry Pi – Is a small computer the size of a deck of playing cards. Although it can run a light version of Windows 10, the primary OS that will run on it Linux. What makes it more than a computer is the GPIO ports it exposes so you can add electronic components to it at a low level.
· ESP8266 – This is an exciting low power device that may replace a lot of things the Arduino does. This device has a network and wifi stack built in. There are several form factors we will be using, the most prevalent will be the ESP-01 and the NodeMCU form factor, although way may be using LUA to program these devices, the main tool we will use to program these devices is the same Arduino IDE.
· Linux – We will also be covering Linux an open source operating system. It is the main OS the Raspberry Pi will be running. Through Linux we will learn about the LAMP stack which stands for Linux Apache MySQL PHP. We will also learn about sending mail.
· 3D Printing – We will also learn how to build physical mounts to house all of these devices.
This is a simple intro do what this project is, information does go stale check the date above to see how old information in this page is. But the site where I keep up to date information is on the “Make Something” tab and my blog located at