Ioana Culic - Commercial and Industrial Internet of Things Applications with the Raspberry Pi: Prototyping IoT Solutions

Any source code or other supplementary material referenced by the author in this book is available to readers on GitHub via the books product page, located at www.apress.com/978-1-4842-5295-6 . For more detailed information, please visit http://www.apress.com/source-code .

During the last couple of years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has become a mature technology with applications both in the industrial and consumer markets. The IoT revolution promises to create ambient intelligence by connecting all the devices and objects around us and enabling them to adapt and behave following peoples needs. A simple example would be a scenario in which the alarm clock is aware of the meeting you have at 9:00 AM and by taking into account the traffic conditions, it wakes you up at an appropriate hour, without you having to set it up the previous evening. Also, the coffee machine has already the coffee prepared for you, and other arrangements for the day are taken into consideration. While this scenario is still to be achieved, many technological advancements have been made in this direction. The result is a wide range of embedded hardware devices, various communication protocols with an accent on efficiency and security, and plenty of software platforms designed to manage all these resources.

One of the most popular hardware platforms for prototyping IoT applications is the Raspberry Pi. Hobbyists and students everywhere have been integrating it into IoT projects since 2012, when the first version was released. From controlling home lights to automatically feeding your pet, the Pi is present in many peoples homes. However, few people think of it as something more than a prototyping or educational platform.

The purpose of this book is to give you a new perspective on how the Raspberry Pi can be used by integrating it into commercial or industrial applications that can be easily scaled and deployed as products.

Throughout the book, we will guide you through a series of practical examples that use the Raspberry Pi as the core around which fully developed products are built. We hope that after you follow all the examples, you will have a different view of how the Raspberry Pi or other similar devices can be used and have a complete perspective on how to move from prototyping a home device to building a fully scalable and marketable product.

The book targets people passionate about building Internet of Things systems: from hobbyists to entrepreneurs, especially those who would like to start a business in this area. The notions presented are accessible to any person who has had some contact with the Raspberry Pi or some similar device and understands basic pin control operations. Some web development (HTTP and JavaScript/jQuery/Vue.js/Angular.js) experience is welcomed as this can help understand the presented concepts quicker. However, the projects are detailed step by step, so anybody with a basic understanding of programming can follow them. The final goal is to obtain several working IoT prototypes.

All the chapters that describe applications are structured in a manner that outlines the necessary components of any successful IoT system: the hardware components, the software platform, and the connection to other devices and the Internet.

For the hardware aspect, besides the description of how to build and connect the components to the Raspberry Pi, we will also present the full connection schematic. Each chapter will also begin with a list of components necessary for building the project hardware.

On the software side, the applications that we build will consist of a user interface and application logic. The two are written using HTML and JavaScript technologies. For the User Interface (UI) control, we will integrate Vue.js as a framework built for easier and faster development of HTML-based user interfaces. To run the applications on the Raspberry Pi, we will integrate them with the Electron framework.

The Internet connection component will be addressed by incorporating a web API into the applications. In each chapter, we will present a different web service (e.g., social network interaction, weather information, or image processing) that is a vital component of the overall system and which delivers the specific IoT flavor to the application.

This book aims to present the essential IoT technologies in a very practical manner. As a result, each chapter guides the reader through building a prototype of an IoT application, requiring specific hardware components to be connected to the Raspberry Pi.