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

Introducing the Raspberry Pi Zero board


The Raspberry Pi Zero is a board that was introduced in 2015, and the goal was to make a low-cost ($5), small-format board with most of the functionalities of the original Raspberry Pi board.

The following is an image of the Zero board:

In the center of the board, you will find the same System-on-a-Chip (SoC) as the original Raspberry Pi board, with a 1-GHz single-core processor, 512 MB of RAM, and a graphical processing unit.

The board has several inputs and outputs, like the 40-pin GPIO connector that we will use through this whole book to connect the board to sensors and other components.

There are also two USB ports (one for power, one for communication), one mini-HDMI port, and one SD card slot to put the operating system and other files in.

The power consumption of the board was also reduced compared to the first board, going from 1.5W to 0.8W.