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

Chapter 4. Controlling Appliances fromthe Raspberry Pi Zero

In previous chapters, we mainly focused on using sensors with our Raspberry Pi, to log data, display it graphically, and also to build a nice thermostat based on the Raspberry Pi Zero.

In this chapter, we are going to focus solely on controlling devices using the Raspberry Pi Zero. Indeed, in any smart home, you are going to want to control devices in order to automate your home.

To cover most of the devices you could have in your home, we are going to see three examples in this chapter. First we will learn how to control and dim a simple LED, which means you'll learn how to control any LED-based lighting in your home. Then, we'll see how to control a DC motor using the Raspberry Pi Zero, which can, for example, be applied to control window blinds. Finally, we'll see how to control a lamp and basically, any on/off appliances in your home. Let's start!