How to Automate Your Home with a Raspberry Pi
If you’re into home automation, chances are, you’ve stumbled upon some expensive home automation systems advertised on the market. While such systems come ready-to-use with advanced functionalities, you can learn to design your own, cost-effective home automation system using Raspberry Pi.
What is a Raspberry Pi
Raspberry Pi is a low-cost minicomputer that debuted in the digital and automation market in 2012. Since then, it has rapidly gained popularity among DIY enthusiasts looking to experiment with their computer and innovation skills.
The Raspberry Pi has been used to create impressive gaming experiences, control computers, computer-powered devices, and even handle complex business processes and tasks. With the Raspberry Pi, you have a multipurpose home theater PC. With this device and using some special software such as the OSMC, you can develop media apps and even control your smart devices through a controller or remote.
The use of Raspberry Pi has, however, shown advanced applications in specific markets compared to others. Home automation is one area that has seen massive success. But since this is a minicomputer with a limited user interface, it demands some know-how to operate and get it running.
The latest version of Raspberry Pi is Pi 4, which comes with better connectivity and higher performance in processor speed, memory, and multimedia performance. The minicomputer is also quite affordable, and you can choose either the Pi board only, which starts from $35 for the 1GB of Ram, or the full desktop kit with 4GB of RAM for about $ 130. The latter comes with a mini mouse & keyboard, and power supply.
Getting Started With Raspberry Pi
Once you’ve chosen a Raspberry Pi that best suits your needs, there are a couple of things you’ll need to get started. These include:
A Smart Home Product: Raspberry Pi is just a minicomputer used to send and control commands to an external smart device and not do the physical task you want automated. This means you’ll need to shop around for a smart, Raspberry Pi-powered product. More often, nearly all the smart products out there are Raspberry Pi compatible.
A Relay Module: This module enables the communication between the user and the smart home products’ control system. An example of a relay module is the JBTEK 4 Channel relay module. You can choose any from the market, provided it gets the job done.
Home Automation Software: Some smart devices come with built-in software, but sometimes you need to get a software package compatible with the smart product you want to control using the Raspberry Pi. An example is MyPi, MisterHouse, Mycroft, etc.
Power Adapter: You’ll need this to power the Raspberry Pi.
A MicroSD card: This storage device is necessary to boot up Raspberry Pi. It also stores all the programs.
Technical Know-How: Perhaps this is the most important of all. Without knowledge in python, there’s very little you can do with this powerful minicomputer.
Skills You’ll Need to Automate Your Home Using a Raspberry Pi.
Before you can get the Raspberry Pi running, you need some technical know-how. If you’re willing to go the extra mile to learn some bit of code and dive deep into the Raspberry Pi syntax, DIY-home automation won’t be that complicated.
There are plenty of resources available online if you want to begin learning the basics of home automation with Raspberry Pi. However, not everyone will find this useful, especially if you don’t have the time to sort out all the resources to find what works for you.
If this is the case, signing up for a coding Bootcamp can be a great alternative.
According to Coursereport, the average full-time coding Bootcamp in the United States costs around $13,500. Coding Bootcamp tuition costs around $ 7,800 to $ 21,000, and for someone on a budget, this can be a lot of money.
For Military veterans, these figures can be subsidized using the GI Bill benefits. The latter offers financial aid programs, which pay for a part/entire education and professional courses for veterans and their families. When looking for a coding academy to use your GI benefits, you want to make sure that the skills you’ll get are relevant to your needs. For example, if you’re going to learn Raspberry Pi home automation skills, you want to sign up for python classes before choosing a specialty.
The one advantage of coding Bootcamps is the accelerated pace of learning. Here, learning to code becomes easy and convenient since you’ll be focusing only on the relevant coding classes. You can also choose to learn only the in-demand and highly marketable programming languages.
Final Thoughts
A Raspberry Pi is not only a great piece of home automation but a powerful minicomputer you can use to design nearly anything you can think of. As long as you can get started with this device, your imagination is the limit. However, Raspberry Pi requires more technical aptitude to set it up and integrate with smart home appliances since it lacks some user interface polish.
