This job is a fantastic example of the Raspberry Pi’s ability to eclipse Arduino when it pertains to interaction. [Fall Deaf] mentions that he utilized to utilize an Arduino board with an Ethernet shield to add extensible interactivity to his project. but this one, which is a home automation lamp project, utilizes a Raspberry Pi instead. The ideas end up being extremely similar. but the expense of the hardware is less and the coding work is probably orders of magnitude easier.

Don’t get us wrong, the hardware is fundamentally different. When you step from Arduino to RPi you lose some I/O pins and the low level manage of them isn’t rather as straight-forward. but you also don’t have to program the thing in C. The Linux kernel handles the low level manage which indicates you can compose your scripts utilizing Python. because Python is an interpreted language the testing and debugging is much quicker — no requirement to flash new code, just run the script again.

This job utilized the RPi GPIO to drive a strip of LEDs which utilize the WS2801 protocol. The board includes a NIC which makes it a snap to utilize as a web server. The wise phone controls seen above are served up from the Pi utilizing jQuery. ideal now there’s a cord running out of the lamp. but there must be lots of space to utilize a screw-in outlet adapter and to hide the RPi and its PSU inside.

The board still has sufficient juice to drive other automation features too, like functioning as a web radio server.