Book Image

Hands-On Internet of Things with Blynk

By : Pradeeka Seneviratne
Book Image

Hands-On Internet of Things with Blynk

By: Pradeeka Seneviratne

Overview of this book

Blynk, known as the most user-friendly IoT platform, provides a way to build mobile applications in minutes. With the Blynk drag-n-drop mobile app builder, anyone can build amazing IoT applications with minimal resources and effort, on hardware ranging from prototyping platforms such as Arduino and Raspberry Pi 3 to industrial-grade ESP8266, Intel, Sierra Wireless, Particle, Texas Instruments, and a few others. This book uses Raspberry Pi as the main hardware platform and C/C++ to write sketches to build projects. The first part of this book shows how to set up a development environment with various hardware combinations and required software. Then you will build your first IoT application with Blynk using various hardware combinations and connectivity types such as Ethernet and Wi-Fi. Then you'll use and configure various widgets (control, display, notification, interface, time input, and some advanced widgets) with Blynk App Builder to build applications. Towards the end, you will learn how to connect with and use built-in sensors on Android and iOS mobile devices. Finally you will learn how to build a robot that can be controlled with a Blynk app through the Blynk cloud and personal server. By the end of this book, you will have hands-on experience building IoT applications using Blynk.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

Using Display Widgets

Display widgets allow you to display any data coming from the hardware. As an example, you can display temperature readings on the Blynk app that come from a temperature sensor attached to the Raspberry Pi. The Widget Box provides different types of display widgets, so you can choose one based on your display requirement. In this chapter, you will learn about some of the important display widgets that you can use with the Blynk app builder:

  • Value Display
  • Labeled Value
  • LED

Before adding any display widget to your canvas, delete any existing controller widgets to save energy, because each widget costs energy. You can also rename the project to displays. However, the screen captures presented in this chapter used the same Blynk application, named Controllers, without renaming it.