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

Controlling home appliances


In the final section of this chapter, we are going to see how to control appliances in your home that can only be set to on or off, for example, lamps, but also heaters, coffee machines, and other appliances. In this section, you are going to learn how to control a simple desk lamp using your Raspberry Pi Zero.

Let's first see how to assemble the project. Simply connect the Vin+ pin of the PowerSwitch Tail Kit to the GPIO18 pin on the Raspberry Pi Zero, and the two remaining pins of the PowerSwitch Tail to GND.

The following image shows the final result:

Of course, after this you need to connect a lamp to the project. For that, I used a simple 30W desk lamp. You simply need to connect the appliance you want to control to the female plug of the PowerSwitch Tail, and then connect it to the mains electricity via the male power plug.

We are now going to see how to control the lamp using a simple interface, which will run on our Raspberry Pi. For that, we'll again use...