A friend of mine recently bought an Arduino Uno after I mentioned it in a conversation. It’s much the same as a PICAXE but it is designed to be much easier to program (even though the PIXAXE was programmed in BASIC which wasn’t really so basic). I decided it would be fun to try it as well because it has something called an Ethernet Shield (a shield is just an expansion or add-on board).

The Ethernet Shield allows you to connect it to the Internet. This allows you to do so much more with it, and that’s where I got the idea for basic home automation. My first idea was to control a light to begin with and work my way up from there. I’d like to make a remote reset system for my home server set up. I’d like to make it so I can reset the server remotely should it be required.

This got me thinking of other ideas as well such as a weather display (I’ve seen a few of these around) or a server monitor for my server in France and at home. I’ll probably think of even more ideas along the way as well as there are so many “shields” you can get for the Arduino, including GPS, GSM (mobile phone), LCD screens and more.

Source: Arduino.cc

I’ll be updating the blog with my progress once I receive my Arduino and Ethernet Shield, and I will probably post code that I use as well. Hopefully it won’t take too long to get used to as it looks much like PHP code that I’m familiar with.