Book Image

Building Smart Homes with Raspberry Pi Zero

By : Marco Schwartz
Book Image

Building Smart Homes with Raspberry Pi Zero

By: Marco Schwartz

Overview of this book

The release of the Raspberry Pi Zero has completely amazed the tech community. With the price, form factor, and being high on utility—the Raspberry Pi Zero is the perfect companion to support home automation projects and makes IoT even more accessible. With this book, you will be able to create and program home automation projects using the Raspberry Pi Zero board. The book will teach you how to build a thermostat that will automatically regulate the temperature in your home. Another important topic in home automation is controlling electrical appliances, and you will learn how to control LED Lights, lamps, and other electrical applications. Moving on, we will build a smart energy meter that can measure the power of the appliance, and you’ll learn how to switch it on and off. You’ll also see how to build simple security system, composed of alarms, a security camera, and motion detectors. At the end, you will integrate everything what you learned so far into a more complex project to automate the key aspects of your home. By the end, you will have deepened your knowledge of the Raspberry Pi Zero, and will know how to build autonomous home automation projects.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Building Smart Homes with Raspberry Pi Zero
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Reading data from the sensor


As the first project of this chapter, we are simply going to see how to read data from the sensor. As for all the projects in this book, we'll use Node.js, which is a great framework for building projects on your Raspberry Pi Zero.

I will now go through the main parts of this first piece of code. It starts by including the DHT sensor module for Node.js:

var sensorLib = require('node-dht-sensor');

Then, we create an object to read data from the sensor and initialize it when we start the software:

var sensor = {
    initialize: function () {
        return sensorLib.initialize(11, 4);
    },
    read: function () {
        var readout = sensorLib.read();
        console.log('Temperature: ' + readout.temperature.toFixed(2) + 'C, ' +
            'humidity: ' + readout.humidity.toFixed(2) + '%');
        setTimeout(function () {
            sensor.read();
        }, 2000);
    }
};

if (sensor.initialize()) {
    sensor.read();
} else {
    console.warn('Failed to initialize...