Raspberry Pi IOT Projects Book Published

January 31, 2017 Arduino Software, ESP8266, IOT, IOT Projects Book, Projects, Raspberry Pi, RasPiConnect, SwitchDoc Products, Tutorials
IOT Projects Book

IOT Projects BookRaspberry Pi IOT Projects Book Published

APress/Springer-Daniel has published a new IOT Projects book on building IOT devices with the Raspberry Pi and ESP8266 written by our SwitchDoc Labs CTO, Dr. John Shovic.

This book is designed for entry-through-intermediate-level device designers who want to build their own Internet of Things (IoT) projects for prototyping and proof-of-concept purposes. Expert makers may also find interesting new approaches. Raspberry Pi IoT Projects contains the tools needed to build a prototype of your design, sense the environment, communicate with the Internet (over the Internet and Machine to Machine communications) and display the results.

[callout size=”col-12″ title=”Raspberry Pi IOT Projects” button_title=”Buy the Book” button_link=”https://amzn.to/2cAW2Zp”  button_size=”normal” button_rounded=”true” button_color=”red”]

The Light Swarm IOT Project

One of the projects include a multiple self organizing IOT device Light Swarm project figure2-11demonstrating IOT swarm behavior (with a Raspberry Pi computer keeping track of what is going on).   Even five simple IOT devices exhibit very interesting behavior.

Why do we say that the LightSwarm code is self organizing?  It is because there is no central control of who is the master and who is the slave.  This makes the system more reliable and able to function even in bad environment.  Self organization is defined as a process where some sort of order arises out of the local interactions between smaller items in an initially disordered system.

figure2-15Typically these kinds of systems are robust, and able to survive in a chaotic environment.   Self organizing systems occurs in a variety of physical, biological and social systems.

One reason to build these kinds of systems is that the individual devices can be small and not very smart and yet the overall task or picture of the data being collected and processed can be amazingly interesting and informative.

The Control Panel

RasPiConnect (and the Arduino version, ArduinoConnect) is software designedfigure2-5 for the iPad and iPhone for building Internet enabled control panels connecting to small computers.   It is designed to be light in memory and processor usage.  It has prebuilt servers in Python for the Raspberry Pi (actually any type of computer running Python) and in C/C++ for use in the Arduino IDE.  We could easily implement a version running on the EPS8266 and plan to do that in a future project.  You can do complex interface designs using RasPiConnect.

The picture below shows the LightSwarm RasPiConnect control panel running.  The control panel shows that there are currently three active LightSwarm devices with 125 being the master (with the brightest lights) while the others are slaves.  You can send a variety of commands to the swarm, such as resetting a specific swarm device, blinking lights on a swarm device or reseting the entire swarm.

figure2-14