Book Image

Getting Started with Python for the Internet of Things

By : Tim Cox, Steven Lawrence Fernandes, Sai Yamanoor, Srihari Yamanoor, Prof. Diwakar Vaish
Book Image

Getting Started with Python for the Internet of Things

By: Tim Cox, Steven Lawrence Fernandes, Sai Yamanoor, Srihari Yamanoor, Prof. Diwakar Vaish

Overview of this book

This Learning Path takes you on a journey in the world of robotics and teaches you all that you can achieve with Raspberry Pi and Python. It teaches you to harness the power of Python with the Raspberry Pi 3 and the Raspberry Pi zero to build superlative automation systems that can transform your business. You will learn to create text classifiers, predict sentiment in words, and develop applications with the Tkinter library. Things will get more interesting when you build a human face detection and recognition system and a home automation system in Python, where different appliances are controlled using the Raspberry Pi. With such diverse robotics projects, you'll grasp the basics of robotics and its functions, and understand the integration of robotics with the IoT environment. By the end of this Learning Path, you will have covered everything from configuring a robotic controller, to creating a self-driven robotic vehicle using Python. • Raspberry Pi 3 Cookbook for Python Programmers - Third Edition by Tim Cox, Dr. Steven Lawrence Fernandes • Python Programming with Raspberry Pi by Sai Yamanoor, Srihari Yamanoor • Python Robotics Projects by Prof. Diwakar Vaish
Table of Contents (37 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Connecting remotely to Raspberry Pi over the network using VNC


Often, it is preferable to remotely connect to and control Raspberry Pi across the network, for instance, using a laptop or desktop computer as a screen and keyboard, or while Raspberry Pi is connected elsewhere, perhaps even connected to some hardware it needs to be close to.

VNC is just one way in which you can remotely connect to Raspberry Pi. It will create a new desktop session that will be controlled and accessed remotely. The VNC session here is separate from the one that may be active on Raspberry Pi's display.

Getting ready

Ensure that your Raspberry Pi is powered up and connected to the internet. We will use the internet connection to install a program using apt-get. This is a program that allows us to find and install applications directly from the official repositories.

How to do it...

  1. First, we need to install the TightVNC server on Raspberry Pi with the following commands. It is advisable to run an update command first to get the latest version of the package you want to install, as follows:
sudo apt-get updatesudo apt-get install tightvncserver
  1. Accept the prompt to install and wait until it completes. To start a session, use the following command:
vncserver :1
  1. The first time you run this, it will ask you to enter a password (of no more than eight characters) to access the desktop (you will use this when you connect from your computer).

The following message should confirm that a new desktop session has been started:

New 'X' desktop is raspberrypi:1

If you do not already know the IP address of Raspberry Pi, use hostname -I and take note of it.

Next, we need to run a VNC client. VNC Viewer is suitable program, which is available at http://www.realvnc.com/ and should work on Windows, Linux, and OS X.

When you run VNC Viewer, you will be prompted for the Server address and Encryption type. Use the IP address of your Raspberry Pi with :1. That is, for the IP address 192.168.1.69, use the 192.168.1.69:1 address.

You can leave the Encryption type as Off or Automatic.

Depending on your network, you may be able to use the hostname; the default is raspberrypi, that is raspberrypi:1.

You may have a warning about not having connected to the computer before or having no encryption. You should enable encryption if you are using a public network or if you are performing connections over the internet (to stop others from being able to intercept your data).

There's more...

You can add options to the command line to specify the resolution and also the color depth of the display. The higher the resolution and color depth (can be adjusted to use 8-bits to 32-bits per pixel to provide low or high color detail), the more data has to be transferred through the network link. If you find the refresh rate a little slow, try reducing these numbers as follows:

vncserver :1 -geometry 1280x780 -depth 24

To allow the VNC server to start automatically when you switch on, you can add the vncserver command to .bash_profile (this is executed each time Raspberry Pi starts).

Use the nano editor as follows (the -c option allows the line numbers to be displayed):

sudo nano -c ~/.bash_profile

Add the following line to the end of the file:

vncserver :1

The next time you power up, you should be able to remotely connect using VNC from another computer.