I spent last weekend hanging out with some friends. In between the drinking and the highly abusive Super Smash Brothers Brawl matches I broke out my Raspberry Pi, Arduinos and XBee modules to show my friend Mike an example of what could be done with them and how they could be used in a home automation system. Mike has had an Arduino for a few months and has got it controlling some relays connected to a mains power strip, however he wants it to do a lot more. I have been wanting to create a home automation system for some time, but as usual I have procrastinated about it a lot.

I gave Mike a run through of a simple server application running on the Pi, written in Python and a quick Arduino client application. However Mike is completely new to Python and I have a habit of explaining things a bit too quickly. This coupled with the alcohol means that it’s unlikely that any of what I said really got acknowledged, so I thought I’d write up a quick tutorial on getting an Arduino talking to a Pi via XBee modules.

You can find the tutorial here: Arduino to Pi