The book is split into two parts: the first part covers creating Alexa skills and the second part, designing Internet of Things and Smart Home devices using a Raspberry Pi.

The first chapters describe the process of Alexa communication, opening an Amazon account and creating a skill for free. The operation of an Alexa skill and terminology such as utterances, intents, slots, and conversations are explained. Debugging your code, saving user data between sessions, S3 data storage and Dynamo D...

LTspice, developed by Analog Devices, is a powerful, fast, and free SPICE simulator, schematic capture, and waveform viewer with a large database of components supported by SPICE models from all over the world. Drawing a schematic in LTspice is easy and fast. Thanks to its powerful graphing features, you can visualize the voltages and currents in a circuit, and also the power consumption of its components and much more.

This book is about learning to design and simulate electronic circuits u...

This book serves as the very first step to for novices to learn Python programming. The book is divided into ten chapters. In the first chapter, readers are introduced to the basics of Python. It has the detailed instructions for installation on various platforms such as macOS, Windows, FreeBSD, and Linux. It also covers the other aspects of Python programming such as IDEs and Package Manager. The second chapter is where the readers get an opportunity to have a detailed hands-on with Python p...

The Raspberry Pi Pico and Pico W are based on the fast, efficient, and low-cost dual-core ARM Cortex M0+ RP2040 microcontroller chip running at up to 133 MHz and sporting 264 KB of SRAM and 2 MB of Flash memory. Besides spacious memory, the Pico and Pico W offer many GPIO pins, and popular peripheral interface modules like ADC, SPI, I²C, UART, PWM, timing modules, a hardware debug interface, and an internal temperature sensor.

The Raspberry Pi Pico W additionally includes an on-board In...

The RTL-SDR devices (V3 and V4) have gained popularity among radio amateurs because of their very low cost and rich features. A basic system may consist of a USB based RTL-SDR device (dongle) with a suitable antenna, a Raspberry Pi 5 computer, a USB based external audio input-output adapter, and software installed on the Raspberry Pi 5 computer. With such a modest setup, it is possible to receive signals from around 24 MHz to over 1.7 GHz.

This book is aimed at amateur radio enthusiast...

Based on the low-cost 8-bit ATmega328P processor, the Arduino Uno R3 board is likely to score as the most popular Arduino family member so far, and this workhorse has been with us for many years. Recently, the new Arduino Uno R4 was released, based on a 48-MHz, 32-bit Cortex-M4 processor with a huge amount of SRAM and flash memory. Additionally, a higher-precision ADC and a new DAC are added to the design. The new board also supports the CAN Bus with an interface.

Two versions of the boa...

An Arduino board has now become ‘the’ basic component in the maker community. No longer is an introduction to the world of microcontrollers the preserve of the expert. When it comes to expanding the capabilities of the basic Arduino board however, the developer is still largely on his own. If you really want to build some innovative projects it’s often necessary to get down to component level. This can present many beginners with major problems. That is exactly where this book begins.

T...