Colin Dow - Internet of Things Programming Projects

BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI

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First published: October 2018

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Colin Dow is the owner and chief engineer of Sigma Rockets and Aerospace Inc., a model aerospace business. He has enjoyed working with numerous educational facilities and hobbyists in delivering product sales, presentations, and aerospace workshops over the years.

Colin has extensive experience of creating website content, educational documentation, and instructional videos.

He has been a programmer since early home computers first caught his eye. He has worked as a software developer for some of Canada's largest companies, using technologies such as Python, Java, J2EE, PHP, Pearl, Ruby on Rails, Apache, and SOAP web services.

Arvind Ravulavaru is a platform architect at Ubiconn IoT Solutions, with over 9 years of experience of software development and 2 years experience of hardware and product development. For the last 5 years, he has been working extensively on JavaScript, both on the server side and the client side. Over the past couple of years, his focus has been on IoT, building a platform for rapidly developing IoT solutions named The IoT Suitcase. Prior to that, Arvind worked on big data, cloud computing, and orchestration.

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The Internet of Things (IoT) promises to unlock the real world the way that the internet unlocked millions of computers just a few decades ago. First released in 2012, the Raspberry Pi computer has taken the world by storm. Originally designed to give newer generations the same excitement to programming that personal computers from the 1980s did, the Raspberry Pi has gone on to be a staple of millions of makers everywhere.

In 1991, Guido van Rossum introduced the world to the Python programming language. Python is a terse language and was designed for code readability. Python programs tend to require fewer lines of code than other programming languages. Python is a scalable language that can be used for anything from the simplest programs to massive large-scale projects.

In this book, we will unleash the power of Raspberry Pi and Python to create exciting IoT projects.

The first part of the book introduces the reader to the amazing Raspberry Pi. We will learn how to set it up and jump right into Python programming. We will start our foray into real-world computing by creating the "Hello World" app for physical computing, the flashing LED.

Our first project takes us back to an age when analog needle meters ruled the world of data display. Think back to those old analog multimeters and endless old sci-fi movies where information was controlled and displayed with buttons and big flashing lights. In our project, we will retrieve weather data from a web service and display it on an analog needle meter. We will accomplish this using a servo motor connected to our Raspberry Pi through the GPIO.

Home security systems are pretty much ubiquitous in modern life. Entire industries and careers are based on the installation and monitoring of them. Did you know that you could easily create your own home security system? In our second project, we do just that, as we build a home security system using Raspberry Pi as a web server to display it.