Book Image

Practical Internet of Things with JavaScript

By : Arvind Ravulavaru
Book Image

Practical Internet of Things with JavaScript

By: Arvind Ravulavaru

Overview of this book

In this world of technology upgrades, IoT is currently leading with its promise to make the world a more smarter and efficient place. This book will show you how to build simple IoT solutions that will help you to understand how this technology works. We would not only explore the IoT solution stack, but we will also see how to do it with the world’s most misunderstood programming language - JavaScript. Using Raspberry Pi 3 and JavaScript (ES5/ES6) as the base to build all the projects, you will begin with learning about the fundamentals of IoT and then build a standard framework for developing all the applications covered in this book. You will then move on to build a weather station with temperature, humidity and moisture sensors and further integrate Alexa with it. Further, you will build a smart wearable for understanding the concept of fall detection. You will then extend it with the 'If This Then That' (IFTTT) rules engine to send an email on fall detection. Finally, you will be working with the Raspberry Pi 3 camera module and surveillance with a bit of facial detection using Amazon Rekognition platform. At the end of the book, you will not only be able to build standalone exciting IoT applications but also learn how you can extend your projects to another level.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Dedication
Preface

Preface

We are part of a generation where people have already started adapting to IoT products. There is a lot of hype about IoT. This book will focus on building IoT-based applications that will help you to achieve a higher level of understanding when it comes to IoT. It will follow a project-based approach that will teach you to build standalone exciting, applications and will also teach you to extend your project to another level. We are going to use JavaScript as our programming language and Raspberry Pi 3 as our hardware to build interesting IoT solutions.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, The World of IoT, introduces you to the world of IoT. We will be looking at the history of IoT, identifying a few use cases, and getting a technical overview of what were are going to cover in this book.

Chapter 2, IoTFW.js - I, walks you through how to build a reference framework for developing IoT solutions using JavaScript. In this chapter, we cover the high-level architecture and get started with installing the required software. We will start with downloading the base application and stitching the Raspberry Pi together with the MQTTS broker and API engine.

Chapter 3, IoTFW.js - II, continues from where we left off in the previous chapter and completes the implementation of the API engine, web app, desktop app, and mobile app. At the end of this chapter, we implement a simple example with an LED and a temperature sensor, where instructions from the apps will turn the LED on/off and the value of the temperature sensor updates in real time.

Chapter 4, Smart Agriculture, talks about building a simple weather station using the reference architecture we have built. The weather station consists of four sensors, and using these we can monitor farm conditions. We will be making the required changes to the API engine, web app, desktop app, and mobile app.

Chapter 5, Smart Agriculture and Voice AI, shows how we can leverage the power of voice AI technology to build interesting IoT solutions. We are going to work with the smart weather station and add a one-channel mechanical relay to this setup. Then, using voice commands and Amazon Alexa, we are going to manage the weather station.

Chapter 6, Smart Wearable, talks about an interesting use case in the healthcare sector, postoperation patient care. Using a smart wearable device equipped with a simple accelerometer, one can easily detect whether a patient has fallen down. In this chapter, we build the required setup comment to gather the accelerometer values from the sensor.

Chapter 7, Smart Wearable and IFTTT, explains how the data collected from the accelerometer can be used to detect falls and at the same time notify the API engine. Using a popular concept named If This Then That (IFTTT)—we will be building our own rules engine, which will process predefined rules and take action accordingly. In our example, we are going to send an email to the patient's carer if a fall is detected.

Chapter 8, Raspberry Pi Image Streaming, shows how to take advantage of the Raspberry Pi camera module to build a real-time image streaming (MJPEG technology) solution to monitor your surroundings from anywhere in the world. We will also implement motion-based video capture to capture video when motion is detected.

Chapter 9, Smart Surveillance, walks you through the process of image recognition using Amazon's Rekognition platform. We will be capturing an image when motion is detected using the Raspberry Pi 3 camera module. Then, we will send this image to Amazon Rekognition platform to detect whether the image we have taken is of an intruder or of someone we know.

What you need for this book

To start building IoT solutions using JavaScript, you need to have the following:

  • Medium to advanced knowledge of JavaScript – ES5 and ES6
  • Medium to advanced knowledge of MEAN stack application development
  • Medium to advanced knowledge of Angular 4
  • Medium to advanced knowledge of Electron Framework
  • Medium to advanced knowledge of Ionic Framework 3
  • Novice to medium knowledge of digital electronic circuits
  • Novice to medium knowledge of Raspberry Pi
  • Novice to medium knowledge on sensors and actuators

Who this book is for

It is for readers who are already well versed with JavaScript and want to extend their JavaScript knowledge to building hardware solutions in the field of IoT. IoT enthusiasts interested in creating exciting projects will also find this book useful. This book is also useful for readers who are good at developing standalone solutions using Raspberry Pi; this book will help them add IoT capabilities to their existing projects using the world's most misunderstood programming language.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning. Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Now, inside the broker folder, create another folder named certs and cd into that folder." A block of code is set as follows:

// MongoDB connection options
    mongo: {
        uri: 'mongodb://admin:[email protected]:41055/iotfwjs'
    },

    mqtt: {
        host: process.env.EMQTT_HOST || '127.0.0.1',
        clientId: 'API_Server_Dev',
        port: 8883
    }
};

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

openssl req -newkey rsa:2048 -nodes -keyout key.pem -x509 -days 365 -out certificate.pem

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Once logged in, click on the Create New button to create a new DB."

Note

Warnings or important notes appear like this.

Note

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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