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

Configuring the smart plug


We are now going to configure the Raspberry Pi so it behaves like a smart plug. As usual, we'll use Node.js to code the software that will control our Raspberry Pi Zero board.

We start by importing all the required modules for the project:

var mcpadc = require('mcp-spi-adc');
var express = require('express');
var app = express();
var piREST = require('pi-arest')(app);

Note that we are using the mcp-spi-adc module here, which will allow us to easily read data from the MCP3008 chip.

Next, we define the channel to which the current sensor is connected:

var channel = 5;

We also set the value of the load resistance we are using for the sensor:

var resistance = 10;

This will allow us to calculate the actual current flowing through the sensor later on.

So far, you might have noticed that we don't measure the voltage in this project. Indeed, even if we could add another circuit to measure the voltage, we can simply set it in the code:

var voltage = 230; // Europe

Note that you will...