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

Creating an interface for the smart plug


Commercial smart plugs usually come with a nice interface, which you can use from your phone or computer to control the plug via Wi-Fi. In this section, we are going to do exactly the same: build a simple interface that we will use to control the device connected to the smart plug, and also visualize the current and power consumption of the device.

As the code for this part is quite similar to the code of the previous section, I will only highlight the differences here.

Inside the Node.js JavaScript file, we declare the public folder in which we will store the interface:

app.use(express.static('public'));

Then, we need to declare to which pin we connected the output of the smart plug:

var outputPin = 18;

Using Express, we can now define some routes. We define the main route of the application to redirect to the interface file:

app.get('/', function (req, res) {

  res.sendfile(__dirname + '/public/interface.html');

});

Then, as we saw in the previous chapter...