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 5. Making a Smart Plug with the Raspberry Pi Zero

You have probably seen those smart plugs in your local shop: they allow you to not only control appliances remotely, but also to measure the energy consumption of the device connected to the plug. These smart plugs are now available nearly everywhere, from well-known brands such as Belkin.

The following image shows one I bought as an experiment a while ago to see what components were inside:

In this chapter, we are going to learn how to use the Raspberry Pi Zero to make a project that has the same functionalities as a smart plug. You will be able to control an electrical device such as a lamp via Wi-Fi, and also measure its electrical consumption in real time.

Because we are building this device ourselves, we will of course be able to customize it for our needs. For example, we'll learn how to log the data measured by the plug in a database so it can be used later. Let's start!