Taking it down a notch...

So the entire point of this blog is to walk people with minimal programming experience through setting up an automated home with raspberry pis, and after some initial feedback it looks like some of the parts don't make sense...

So, here, I'll try to explain some of my commonly used terms:

• Raspberry Pi - The brain of your project. This is the mother ship. Its a 35$ computer created for amateur hobbyists to tinker with
• Terminal - This is sort of the "DOS" equivalent for Macs and Unix machines. If you're on a mac, click the finder and type "terminal". Press enter, and welcome to a new magical land!
• Sudo - You see me instructing you to type "sudo" several times. What is sudo? Sudo is a program that lets you run other programs with root privileges. Still confused? Basically, you want to run some things on your "mother ship" with the highest privileges ever. Ever seen those pesky "We need your permission to continue" messages while installing stuff? Sudo basically says - "Hey, you have our permission"
• Nano - You see me typing nano, or emacs, or vim, or vi - These are all text editors. Think notepad or textedit - thats basically it!
• Git - Version control. IMPORTANT. What is version control you ask? I love giving this comparison - Have you ever used google drive to do documents/spreadsheets/presentations? If yes, when you open the document, have you seen the "Last edit was made BLAH hours ago" or "last edit was made by BLAH? And clicking that shows you all the edits that have been made, and you can potentially go back a few "revisions" in case you liked an older revision better? Thats it! Thats version control for you. We like to keep a track of all our versions so that in case something goes wrong, we have a revision to go back to. Also similar to SVN
• You see me using the words +5v, GND, Rx, Tx. What are these you ask? +5V refers to the power for your pi. Have you ever seen the red and black wires in plugs? Or in movies when a bomb squad is trying to diffuse the bomb at the last second? One is a power wire, one is a ground (and usually a trip wire so that in case you cut something the bomb goes off anyway). Thats basically it. +5V is the power, GND is ground. RX and TX are the channels for communicating to/from your pi.

Hope this all clears it out a little for the less tech-oriented people. IF you have any more questions/doubts, please post a comment and I'll get back to you as soon as possible!