What this book covers

Chapter 1, Alarm Systems 101, explains what the major components of an alarm system are and what they do.

Chapter 2, Our Very First Alarm System, covers how to build our first alarm system on a breadboard.

Chapter 3, Bigger and Better, covers what to build depending on what you've learned in the previous chapter, and thus make your system even better.

Chapter 4, Building the Hardware, covers how you build the actual hardware that your BeagleBone will use to connect to an external source.

Chapter 5, Testing the Hardware, covers how you test the hardware that you've built. This is where the rubber meets the road. Does your creation work?

Chapter 6, Automating Stuff, introduces some additional uses of the alarm system hardware. Now that you have a working system, it is time to do other things than just monitor some switches.

Chapter 7, Protecting Your Network, covers how you will be moving even further away from the conventional alarm system by using the BeagleBone to monitor the status of your home network. Here, you give the BeagleBone something to do in its spare time, such as protecting your network from the bad guys.

Chapter 8, Keeping an Eye on Things, covers how you can keep an eye on things while away from home. Sitting in a café in Paris and want to know how things are going back home? This chapter shows how to do it.

Chapter 9, Going Further, covers some of the many more cool things you can do with your system. Now that you have all this great new knowledge and a cool platform to play with, you are limited (almost) only by your imagination. Just to get you started, I have added a few suggestions.