Book Image

Raspberry Pi Zero Cookbook

Book Image

Raspberry Pi Zero Cookbook

Overview of this book

The Raspberry Pi Zero, one of the most inexpensive, fully-functional computers available, is a powerful and revolutionary product developed by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. The Raspberry Pi Zero opens up a new world for the makers out there. This book will give you expertise with the Raspberry Pi Zero, providing all the necessary recipes that will get you up and running. In this book, you will learn how to prepare your own circuits rather than buying the expensive add–ons available in the market. We start by showing you how to set up and manage the Pi Zero and then move on to configuring the hardware, running it with Linux, and programming it with Python scripts. Later, we integrate the Raspberry Pi Zero with sensors, motors, and other hardware. You will also get hands-on with interesting projects in media centers, IoT, and more.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Raspberry Pi Zero Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Using a Node.js library to control the GPIOs


When you are controlling the GPIO on your Raspberry Pi Zero, you aren't just limited to Python for building web pages. Node.js is a popular, portable JavaScript server that includes its own package manager and GPIO libraries. Generally speaking, it is also a little more common than serving web pages from Python.

Getting ready

For this, we will be using the popular Node.js and Node Package Manager, or npm. We'll also be using node-red, which is a node-based graphical GPIO configuration tool. This should all be installed with a default Raspbian build, but in case it isn't, you can install the packages individually with apt-get:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install nodejs
sudo apt-get install npm

Next, you will want to install the rpi-gpio package. I had some trouble with this, and had to install node-gyp before I could get the rpio-gpio package to install. Running the following worked great:

sudo npm install node-gyp
sudo...