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

Logging your energy consumption over time


For now, we built a smart plug that has more or less the same features as a commercial smart plug: it can control a device, measure the power consumption of this device, and also comes with a nice graphical interface. In this section, we are going to go further, and see how we can easily add functions to our project with some lines of code.

As an example, we are going to see how to log the measurements made by the board into a database on the Pi so that those measurements can be recalled later. As the code for this section is really similar to the previous section, I will only highlight the main changes here.

Start by importing the required module for the database:

var Datastore = require('nedb')
  db = new Datastore();

After that, we define a route to get all the data currently present inside the database:

app.get('/data', function (req, res) {

  db.find({}, function (err, docs) {

    res.json(docs);

  });

});

Inside the measurement loop, we create...