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

Hardware and software requirements


We have already discussed most of the requirements for this project in the first chapter of this book. Here, you will simply need an additional component: a DHT11 sensor (https://www.adafruit.com/products/386). The following image shows the sensor:

You can of course use other similar sensors, for example the DHT22, which is more precise. To use a DHT22, you will only need to change one thing inside the code we'll see later.

You will also need a 4.7k Ohm resistor to make the sensor work, as well as jumper wires and a breadboard.

Hardware configuration

Let's now look at how to configure the hardware for this project; basically, how to connect the sensor to the Pi Zero board.

The following figure is a schematic to help you out:

As it's the first project we are actually building using the Raspberry Pi Zero, there is something important I wanted to point out here. To connect the board to components like this sensor here, we have two options. You can either use jumper...