The first thing that you will need for this project is a Raspberry Pi B+. I used a B+ model as it is the latest version available to date. It also has nice features (like 4 USB ports), but of course, you can also use an older version.
You will need the official Raspberry Pi camera module to capture pictures. You will use a DHT11 (or DHT22) sensor to measure the temperature and humidity in your home.
Since we will access the Rapsberry Pi remotely, you will need a simple USB WiFi dongle.
You also need to secure an Adafruit cobbler kit, a breadboard, and some jumper wires. You will need these to make the connections between the Raspberry Pi, the camera and the sensor.
Below is the list of the required components for this project:
- Raspberry Pi B+ (along with a microSD card, a microUSB cable, and an HDMI cable)
- Raspberry Pi camera module
- DHT11 sensor with 4.7k Ohm resistor
- USB WiFi dongle
- Adafruit Cobbler Kit
- Jumper wires
- Breadboard
Check if you already have a Linux Distribution installed on your Raspberry Pi. This is to ensure that you have a completely functional Pi. I used Raspbian for this project.
If this is not done yet, you can find an excellent guide on this address:
http://www.raspberrypi.org/help/quick-start-guide/
Connect the Raspberry Pi to your local WiFi network and install a driver for the BCM2835 chip to read the data from the DHT11 sensor.
You can download & install these drivers by following the instructions on this page:
http://www.raspberry-projects.com/pi/programming-in-c/c-libraries/bcm2835-by-mike-mccauley
The whole project is based on Node.js. It will act as a server from which we can access all the functions of our Raspberry Pi.
If it is not done yet, you will have to install Node.js on your Pi. Be wary. You just can’t use apt-get to install the node package module since you might be installing an older version. To install the latest version of Node.js, follow this guide:
http://revryl.com/2014/01/04/nodejs-raspberry-pi/
You will also need to install drivers for the BCM2835 chip. You can download & install these drivers by visiting this page:
http://www.airspayce.com/mikem/bcm2835/
After this, download the files for this project on GitHub:
https://github.com/openhomeautomation/rpi-web-control
To access the Raspberry Pi on your local WiFi network via rapsberrypi.local, we need to install some packages. We do this so that we wouldn’t need to access the Pi via its IP address anymore.
For the rest of the article, you can either log into your Raspberry Pi via SSH or go directly to your Pi and type the following commands:
sudo apt install avahi-daemon netatalk
Page last edited February 10, 2015
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