In this section, we will review building a dashboard in order to control appliances. This could be a dashboard for the aquarium where you would like to monitor all the requisite parameters for the tank or a dashboard for the garden where you can control the flow control valves for your garden based on information from the sensors. We will demonstrate this with a simple example and show how you can use it to meet your requirements.
We will make use of the flask framework to build our dashboard. If you haven't installed the flask framework (from the previous chapters), you can install it as follows:
sudo pip3 install flaskIf you are not familiar with the flask framework, we have written up some basics and getting started in Chapter 7, Requests and Web Frameworks. We are going to discuss controlling the relay board (shown in the picture here) from a web dashboard (available at http://a.co/1qE0I3U).
Relay module
The relay board consists of eight relays...