Book Image

Practical Python Programming for IoT

By : Gary Smart
Book Image

Practical Python Programming for IoT

By: Gary Smart

Overview of this book

The age of connected devices is here, be it fitness bands or smart homes. It's now more important than ever to understand how hardware components interact with the internet to collect and analyze user data. The Internet of Things (IoT), combined with the popular open source language Python, can be used to build powerful and intelligent IoT systems with intuitive interfaces. This book consists of three parts, with the first focusing on the "Internet" component of IoT. You'll get to grips with end-to-end IoT app development to control an LED over the internet, before learning how to build RESTful APIs, WebSocket APIs, and MQTT services in Python. The second part delves into the fundamentals behind electronics and GPIO interfacing. As you progress to the last part, you'll focus on the "Things" aspect of IoT, where you will learn how to connect and control a range of electronic sensors and actuators using Python. You'll also explore a variety of topics, such as motor control, ultrasonic sensors, and temperature measurement. Finally, you'll get up to speed with advanced IoT programming techniques in Python, integrate with IoT visualization and automation platforms, and build a comprehensive IoT project. By the end of this book, you'll be well-versed with IoT development and have the knowledge you need to build sophisticated IoT systems using Python.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Section 1: Programming with Python and the Raspberry Pi
6
Section 2: Practical Electronics for Interacting with the Physical World
9
Section 3: IoT Playground - Practical Examples to Interact with the Physical World

The Paho JavaScript MQTT client

At line (4), we create our Paho-MQTT Client instance and assign it to the client variable.

The parameters to Paho.MQTT.Client() are the broker's hostname and port. We are serving this web page via Mosquitto, so the broker's host and port will be the same as web pages:

const client = new Paho.Client(location.hostname,        // (4)
Number(location.port),
CLIENT_ID);

You may have noticed in the http://localhost:8083 URL that the port is 8083, while in Python we used port 1883:

  • Port 1883 is the MQTT protocol port on the broker. Our Python program connects directly to the broker on this port.
  • We previously configured port 8083 as a Web Socket port on the Mosquitto broker. Web pages can speak HTTP and Web Socket protocols, not MQTT.

This raises an important point. While we're using the term MQTT in the context of our JavaScript code, we're really proxying the...