Did you know you can save and retreive images from adafruit.io? You can! That means you can have a Raspberry Pi with a camera upload images to the service, along with other sensor data. Then, another Pi on the other side of the world can view the images and data, to create a custom remote-viewing tracker. It's like your very own Nest but you can add any sort of data over lay you like.
This project uses two Raspberry PIs - a sender and a receiver. The sender has a Raspberry Pi Camera and an MCP9808 temperature sensor to publish data to adafruit.io. The receiver, a dashboard somewhere else in the world, subscribes to this data feed and displays it.
This dashboard Raspberry Pi has a PiTFT and displays the image whenever it’s sent to the feed (every 5 minutes), the current temperature is overlaid on the image using pygame. The final cherry on the cake here is that if you tap the screen you flip to the graph view. This takes the data from the feed using the io-client-python data method, pulls out the last 24 hours and uses matplotlib to draw a graph of temp/time. Of course, you can see the feeds in the adafruit.io online dashboard too!
Shopping list
To follow this guide exactly you'll need:
- 2x Raspberry Pi - you can use anything from a Pi 1 Model B to a Pi 3 or beyond, but a Pi 2 or 3 works best
- 1x PiTFT 2.8", 3.2" or HAT, get one that matches your Pi
- 1x MCP9808 temperature sensor board
- 1x Raspberry Pi Camera
- 2x Wifi dongles or ethernet cables (or built in WiFi on a Pi 3)
- 4x Female to female jumper cables
- A plastic container for the sender
- Some duct tape
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