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)

Reading our GPS data

We need our GPS sensor to get a fix on the GPS satellites before we can read anything useful from it. You will know if this has happened as the small red FIX LED will start to flash once every 15 seconds instead of once every second. If you are running this indoors or are having difficulty getting a satellite lock, you can use the Adfruit SMA to μFL adaptor cable and Adafruit GPS Antenna, and put the antenna near or outside a window to get a satellite lock.

Now that we have a GPS satellite lock we can, at this point, just read the data coming from our GPS sensor by running this:

sudo cat /dev/ttyS0

If you all is well, you should something like this scrolling up your SSH terminal window:

Press Ctrl + C to exit the stream of GPS data. So our sensor is working and receiving data, but we need to be able to make use of this data in our programs. To do this...