Book Image

Internet of Things Programming Projects

By : Colin Dow
Book Image

Internet of Things Programming Projects

By: Colin Dow

Overview of this book

The Internet of Things (IOT) has managed to attract the attention of researchers and tech enthusiasts, since it powerfully combines classical networks with instruments and devices. In Internet of Things Programming Projects, we unleash the power of Raspberry Pi and Python to create engaging projects. In the first part of the book, you’ll be introduced to the Raspberry Pi, learn how to set it up, and then jump right into Python programming. Then, you’ll dive into real-world computing by creating a“Hello World” app using flash LEDs. As you make your way through the chapters, you’ll go back to an age when analog needle meters ruled the world of data display. You’ll learn to retrieve weather data from a web service and display it on an analog needle meter, and build a home security system using the Raspberry Pi. The next project has a modern twist, where we employ the Raspberry Pi to send a signal to a web service that will send you a text when someone is at the door. In the final project, you take what you've learned from the previous two projects and create an IoT robot car that you can use to monitor what your pets are up to when you are away. By the end of this book, you will be well versed in almost every possible way to make your IoT projects stand out.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)

A basic Python program to pull data from the cloud

In Chapter 2, Writing Python Programs Using Raspberry Pi, we introduced a package called weather-api that allows us to access the Yahoo! Weather web service. In this section, we will wrap up the Weather object from the weather-api package in our own class. We will reuse the name CurrentWeather for our class. After testing out our CurrentWeather class, we will utilize the Sense Hat Emulator in Raspbian and build a weather information ticker.

Accessing the web service

We will start out by modifying our CurrentWeather class to make web service calls to Yahoo! Weather through the weather-api package:

  1. Open up Thonny from Application Menu | Programming | Thonny Python IDE.
  2. Click...