And so the research began. As soon as we started to put things down on paper the more questions started to come up. How are we connecting everything together? Is there enough space to build in existing wall outlets? What base station do we use? How do we connect the sytstem and the apps together?

So we started with the base station. This would be our main brain of the system. It would receive the inputs would control the outputs. We something which could support control from apps, websites and ease of us regarding our limited knowledge of different programming languages. We turned to everyone's favourite... Arduino. Since we both own Arduino's why not use them? We didn't want to throw money away just yet as the poor students we are. To support the apps and websites to control the Arduino we needed an IoT solution. Something like an Yun or an ethernet shield. And we had just some Uno's and a Mega. Also it would be nice if we could host a sever of sorts and a website on the device. No we thought Arduino ain't gonnan cut it for a base station. Sure we could figure out something but why not use some other dev board we had on hand. Like a Raspberry Pi?

You can already connect to the internet. It has graphical interface. It can run multiple programs including visualisation. It supports C programs and can run a server and website. And it pretty small for what it can do.

So we settled on using a Raspberry Pi as out base station with a mySQL database that would control the I/O.