Book Image

Hands-On Internet of Things with Blynk

By : Pradeeka Seneviratne
Book Image

Hands-On Internet of Things with Blynk

By: Pradeeka Seneviratne

Overview of this book

Blynk, known as the most user-friendly IoT platform, provides a way to build mobile applications in minutes. With the Blynk drag-n-drop mobile app builder, anyone can build amazing IoT applications with minimal resources and effort, on hardware ranging from prototyping platforms such as Arduino and Raspberry Pi 3 to industrial-grade ESP8266, Intel, Sierra Wireless, Particle, Texas Instruments, and a few others. This book uses Raspberry Pi as the main hardware platform and C/C++ to write sketches to build projects. The first part of this book shows how to set up a development environment with various hardware combinations and required software. Then you will build your first IoT application with Blynk using various hardware combinations and connectivity types such as Ethernet and Wi-Fi. Then you'll use and configure various widgets (control, display, notification, interface, time input, and some advanced widgets) with Blynk App Builder to build applications. Towards the end, you will learn how to connect with and use built-in sensors on Android and iOS mobile devices. Finally you will learn how to build a robot that can be controlled with a Blynk app through the Blynk cloud and personal server. By the end of this book, you will have hands-on experience building IoT applications using Blynk.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

Proximity sensor

Proximity sensors are also known as position sensors and allow you to determine how close your smartphone is to an object (such as your face). The distance can be measured in cm. However, most proximity sensors only return Far/Near information. Therefore, the return value will be 0 or 1, where 0/LOW is Far and 1/HIGH is Near.

As usual, you can add a Proximity Sensor widget to your project canvas from the Widget Box (Figure 6.19):

Figure 6.19: Proximity Sensor widget

Configuring the Proximity Sensor widget

The following steps will show you how to configure the Proximity Sensor widget with a virtual pin:

  1. Tap the Proximity Sensor widget to open the Proximity Sensor Settings page.
  2. Under INPUT, tap PIN and from...