. I've not done any hardware stuff for the last 15 years, but Pi Zero made me come back. It's a game changerSensor Dashboard
I've done a small project on the Pi Zero, the hardware is very basic, temperature sensor, photocell, solar cell and an ADC MCP3008, the aim is to measure temperature, illuminance and voltage. Then stream these values in real time to the cloud, value are displayed real time on a dashboard. So you can imagine the bulk of the work is on the software side, but Google App Engine (GAE) makes it straight forward. Although I'm implementing my code in Java, GAE supports Python as well. I know there are some services around that allow you to connect your Pi and send sensors data, but where is the fun in that. With a custom dashboard you have the freedom to implement all sort of cool stuff not just charts.
The dashboard: https://raspberrypi-dash.appspot.com/
Youtube Demo: https://youtu.be/TNvWOz6w6AE
Full project details: http://omerio.com/2016/01/16/real-time- ... y-pi-zero/
Code in GitHub:
Pi Zero & Java
I've seen many saying that Java isn't lightweight and I was worried that the Pi Zero might not cope. Actually so far I'm using Java on the Pi Zero with Pi4J library, not just Java I'm using Apache Maven as well to build my code and everything is running smoothly. I've tried with and without display (command line) and the Pi Zero seems to cope fine.
Future Ideas
I would love to rewrite the software in Python as I know many are using it with their Pis.
I hope you find this project useful, specially if you want to build your own custom dashboard and manage what you want to show. Would love to hear your comments, ideas, or if you want to collaborate on building something big with the Pi