Preface

Arduino is an amazing platform to quickly create exciting electronics projects. Using the Arduino platform, even non-experts can connect sensors, actuators, and displays together and build complex projects that provide immediate applications for everyday life.

However, these projects are even better when they are connected, meaning they have some way to communicate with other devices, and not necessarily with other Arduino boards. There are many ways to connect Arduino projects together and to other devices such as computers: WiFi, XBee, Bluetooth, and Ethernet. This book will focus entirely on how to create amazing projects using this latest technology to connect Arduino projects.

Using Ethernet has several advantages over wireless solutions: it is fast, cheap, and you will find plenty of help on the subject on the Internet. For me, the most important thing is that the Ethernet library for Arduino is very well documented, and comes built-in with the Arduino software. It's hardware counterpart, the Arduino Ethernet shield, is also very well built and well supported by the Arduino community.

In this book, we are going to see how to use the Ethernet shield and the Ethernet library via six exciting projects. We are going to start with the very basics and see how to connect the Ethernet shield to your local network and the Web. Then, we will send data from the Ethernet shield to a server located on your local network. Finally, we will integrate the Ethernet shield in an "Internet of Things" framework, by building several projects connected directly to the Web.