Book Image

Wearable-Tech Projects with the Raspberry Pi Zero

By : Jon Witts
Book Image

Wearable-Tech Projects with the Raspberry Pi Zero

By: Jon Witts

Overview of this book

With Wearable-Tech Projects with the Raspberry Pi Zero, you will begin with learning how to install the required software for your upcoming projects. You will also learn how to control electronic devices with the GPIOZero Python library. Next, you will be creating some stylish wearable-tech projects such as a motion-reactive LED cap and a Tweet-activated LED T-shirt. Toward the end of the book, you will be creating some useful health and fitness wearable-tech projects; these will help you monitor your heart rate, track your movements with GPS, and count your footsteps with your own pedometer. By the end of the book, you will have created a range of wearable-tech projects and learned enough about your Raspberry Pi Zero that you should be able to adapt these projects further or come up with your own creations!
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

Writing our main Python program

Connect your USB battery to the LED matrix and power up your Pi Zero, and then connect to your Pi Zero via SSH. Move into the Adafruit_DotStar_Pi directory by typing this:

cd ~/WearableTech/Chapter6/Adafruit_DotStar_Pi

We are going to make our Python program in this directory as it contains the necessary files to connect to the DotStar strip with Python. Open a new file in Nano by typing this:

nano ledBag.py

In the empty file that opens, type the following:

#! /usr/bin/python

import time
from random import randint
from dotstar import Adafruit_DotStar

# set up our strip
numpixels = 144
strip = Adafruit_DotStar(numpixels, 12000000, order='bgr')

# start our strip
strip.begin()
strip.setBrightness(32)

In this first section of our program, we are importing our required libraries, setting up the details for our strip, and the initializing the strip...