Home automation has become more popular as Internet of Things devices become more affordable and available. The Raspberry Pi Zero certainly fits the bill: for what would have cost thousands of dollars a few years ago, a handful of sensors and a few Raspberry Pis can turn your home into a "smart home," where you can not only sense what is going on (temperature, lighting, motion, and so on), but you can control things too. With a few Raspberry Pi Zeros and these recipes, you have the potential to do things such as:
Turning lights on and off using a relay controlled by the GPIO
Opening and closing shades with a stepper motor
Checking the temperature in any room of your house
Getting an alert when motion is detected
The possibilities are truly limited; in this recipe, we will look at setting up the hardware for a simple, single-node home automation system.