msudak / pi-websocket

Toggle an LED from your browser using websockets and a raspberry pi.

pi-websocket

Toggle an LED from your browser using websockets and a raspberry pi.

This repository is intended to be a "hello world" for controlling things with your pi + websockets. It's short and modular, and adding other pi functions or UI elements should be simple and straightforward.

Why websockets?

There are already many servers written for the Pi utilizing HTTP protocols. However, websockets offer low-latency communication and tighter JSON-RPC structures (source). This protocol may be more complex to set up for the first time, but working with it is clean and simple.

This library does not use websocket wrappers like socket.io or fallback protocols like Flash. This is pure websocket. As such, it requires using a supported browser.

Requirements

Get a raspberry pi. Wire an LED to it like so:

Open a terminal in your pi, and install these Python dependencies:

pip install tornado RPi.GPIO

Then clone this repository:

git clone https://github.com/patrickfuller/pi-websocket.git

Usage

On your pi, run the server:

cd pi-websocket
sudo python server.py

Open a browser and point it to http://your.pi.ip.address:8000. You can now remotely toggle that LED remotely to your heart's content!