Book Image

Building Smart Homes with Raspberry Pi Zero

By : Marco Schwartz
Book Image

Building Smart Homes with Raspberry Pi Zero

By: Marco Schwartz

Overview of this book

The release of the Raspberry Pi Zero has completely amazed the tech community. With the price, form factor, and being high on utility—the Raspberry Pi Zero is the perfect companion to support home automation projects and makes IoT even more accessible. With this book, you will be able to create and program home automation projects using the Raspberry Pi Zero board. The book will teach you how to build a thermostat that will automatically regulate the temperature in your home. Another important topic in home automation is controlling electrical appliances, and you will learn how to control LED Lights, lamps, and other electrical applications. Moving on, we will build a smart energy meter that can measure the power of the appliance, and you’ll learn how to switch it on and off. You’ll also see how to build simple security system, composed of alarms, a security camera, and motion detectors. At the end, you will integrate everything what you learned so far into a more complex project to automate the key aspects of your home. By the end, you will have deepened your knowledge of the Raspberry Pi Zero, and will know how to build autonomous home automation projects.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Building Smart Homes with Raspberry Pi Zero
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Installing Node.js


To finish this chapter, we are going to install Node.js, which is a powerful framework that we will use to run most of the applications that we are going to see inside this book. Luckily for us, installing Node.js on Raspberry Pi is really simple.

First, log into your Raspberry Pi via SSH. We are going to quickly check that Node.js was not installed with the Linux image. To do so, type the following:

node -v

If this returns the version of Node.js, you can stop there. If it returns an error, you will have to install it manually. To do so, first type the following:

curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_4.x | sudo -E bash -

After that, type the following command, which will install Node.js:

sudo apt-get install -y nodejs

Finally, install some additional tools with the following:

sudo apt-get install -y build-essential

You can now test that Node.js is correctly installed by typing the following:

node -v

Congratulations, you now have a fully configured Raspberry Pi Zero! In the next chapter, we are going to build your first application using the Zero board and learn how to measure data from sensors.