Welcome back to the lab, and welcome to Chapter 5 of our Raspberry Pi for Beginners workshop. In this chapter, we'll be talking about the Internet of Things, or IOT, which is just the idea that physical devices like sensors and actuators can be connected over the internet to pool data.

On the grand scheme of things, this represents some pretty cool ideas like smart grids that can anticipate users' electrical loads, or smart cities that can divert the flow of traffic most efficiently. On the hobbyist level though, for us, the IOT represents some cool projects like home automation or just integrating services that we use daily like Facebook, Twitter, and News.

By the end of this chapter, we'll be able to control our Raspberry Pi's GPIO from anywhere in the world where there is an internet connection. And in order to do that, we'll explore a couple of services along the way. Let's get started.