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How to control Raspberry Pi from the Cloud

A.J. Hunyady

A.J. Hunyady

Co-founder & CEO, InfinyOn

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Raspberry Pi is a versatile low-cost computer ideal for prototyping IoT projects such as air quality monitors, water level sensors, autonomous irrigation systems, surveillance cameras, face recognition robots, home automation, and many more. The Raspberry Pi is easy to connect to your home network but quite challenging to connect and control from the Cloud.

This tutorial will show how to connect Raspberry Pi to InfinyOn Cloud - a high-performance, distributed, programmable streaming platform. Once connected, you can use InfinyOn Cloud or a Fluvio client anywhere in the world to communicate with your device. In addition, this blog will show the ability to control a mini traffic light in real-time.

All message exchanges between your Raspberry Pi and the Cloud are encrypted to ensure privacy and security.

Prerequisites

This blog assumes you have an InfinyOn Cloud account and access to a Raspberry Pi device and a Pi traffic light. As a substitute for the traffic light, you could wire up an LED on the breadboard.

Check Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi should be running Ubuntu, python3 and pip3. To check run the following commands:

$ uname -a
Linux ubuntu 5.8.0-1011-raspi #14-Ubuntu SMP PREEMPT Tue Dec 15 08:58:13 UTC 2020 armv7l armv7l armv7l GNU/Linux

$ python3 -V
Python 3.8.10

$ pip3 -V
pip 21.2.4 from /home/ubuntu/.local/lib/python3.8/site-packages/pip (python 3.8)

We are using python to control the GPIO pins that turns the lights on and off.

Connect the Traffic Lights

Now it’s time to work on the hardware. First, we’ll connect the traffic lights to the Raspberry Pi and ensure they are in working order.

The nice thing about the traffic lights component is that we can directly insert it into the Raspberry Pi pins.

Raspberry Pi Pins

Just make sure the lights face outwards.

Test the Lights

As the traffic lights are controlled through GPIO pins, we need to install a package called gpiozero:

$ sudo apt install python3-gpiozero

It’s time to write some code. Create a file called lights.py and paste the following code:

from gpiozero import LED
from time import sleep

class Lights:
    def __init__(self):
        self.red = LED(9)
        self.yellow = LED(10)
        self.green = LED(11)

    def go(self):
        self.off()
        self.green.on()

    def stop(self):
        self.off()
        self.yellow.on()
        sleep(1)
        self.yellow.off()
        self.red.on()

    def on(self):
        self.red.on()
        self.yellow.on()
        self.green.on()

    def off(self):
        self.red.off()
        self.yellow.off()
        self.green.off()


def main():
    lights = Lights()

    lights.go()
    sleep(1)
    lights.stop()
    sleep(1)

    for x in range(5):
        sleep(.5)
        lights.on()
        sleep(.5)
        lights.off()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

The code has several routines to control the GPIO pins corresponding to red, yellow, and green— each routine is followed by a sleep statement that keeps the lights on for a short time.

To execute the code, run:

$ python3 lights.py

Let’s see it in action:

Very cool, the lights are working corretly.

Installing Fluvio Client

You’ll need to download and install the CLI.

$ curl -fsS https://hub.infinyon.cloud/install/install.sh | bash

This command will download the Fluvio Version Manager (fvm), Fluvio CLI (fluvio) and config files into $HOME/.fluvio, with the executables in $HOME/.fluvio/bin. To complete the installation, you will need to add the executables to your shell $PATH.

Check the version to make sure everything is working correctly:

$ fluvio version

As expected, the client is not yet associated with a cluster. We’ll do that next.

Setup InfinyOn Cloud

InfinyOn Cloud is the intermediation point between your Raspberry Pi and any other devices (cloud or local). Let’s create an account and login with Fluvio client.

Create a free InfinyOn Cloud

Signup at https://infinyon.cloud/signup.

Login with Fluvio Client

In Raspberry Pi, at the terminal, type the following command:

$ fluvio cloud login
Infinyon Cloud email: ...
Password: ...

Fluvio Client establishes a connection with InfinyOn Cloud and downloads your profile. The profile has your TLS settings to ensure message exchanges are encrypted.

Let’s make sure the client can communicate with the cluster in the cloud. Add a topic called lights:

$ fluvio topic create lights
topic "lights" created

Congratulations, your Raspberry Pi is now connected to the cloud.

Install fluvio-python-client

We want to control our light programmatically from our Python code. To accomplish this, we need to install the python native fluvio client.

On Raspberry Pi 2/3, download linux_armv7l:

$ pip3 install https://github.com/infinyon/fluvio-client-python/releases/download/v0.9.5/fluvio-0.9.5-cp38-cp38-linux_armv7l.whl

For Pi Zero, download linux_armv6l:

$ pip3 install https://github.com/infinyon/fluvio-client-python/releases/download/v0.9.5/fluvio-0.9.5-cp38-cp38-linux_armv6l.whl

Update lights.py file

Next, we’ll update the python file from to listen to events from fluvio:

from gpiozero import LED
from time import sleep
from fluvio import (Fluvio, Offset)

class Lights:
    def __init__(self):
        self.red = LED(9)
        self.yellow = LED(10)
        self.green = LED(11)

    def go(self):
        self.off()
        self.green.on()

    def stop(self):
        self.off()
        self.yellow.on()
        sleep(1)
        self.yellow.off()
        self.red.on()

    def on(self):
        self.red.on()
        self.yellow.on()
        self.green.on()

    def off(self):
        self.red.off()
        self.yellow.off()
        self.green.off()


def main():
    lights = Lights()

    fluvio = Fluvio.connect()
    print("connected to fluvio")

    consumer = fluvio.partition_consumer("lights", 0)
    print("retrieved consumer")

    for i in consumer.stream(Offset.end()):
        value = i.value_string()
        print("received: %s" % value)

        if value == "go":
            lights.go()
        elif value == "stop":
            lights.stop()
        elif value == "on":
            lights.on()
        elif value == "off":
            lights.off()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

The code changes are as follows:

  • import Fluvio and Offset from the fluvio python client.
  • extablish a connection to InfinyOn Cloud.
  • open a consumer stream that listens on lights topic on partition 0.
  • for every known command go, stop, on, off, call the light routine.

Let’s restart the program.

Run the new code:

$ python3 lights.py
connected to fluvio
retrieved consumer

Control Raspberry Pi from InfinyOn Cloud

Open the web browser at https://infinyon.cloud, and navigate to lights topic. In the record field, type go, stop and watch the lights change:

Congratulations, your Raspberry Pi is connected to the Cloud!

Control Raspberry Pi from Fluvio CLI

You can also use fluvio cli to remotely contol the device.

In the terminal type:

$ fluvio produce lights
> go
Ok!
> stop
Ok!
> on
Ok!
> off
Ok!
>

Fluvio supports any number of producers and consumers, which enables your Raspberry to be control with multiple producers at the same time.

Conclusion

The blog is an introductory tutorial on how to connect and manage Raspberry Pi from the Cloud. Fluvio and InfinyOn Cloud has many more feature that can help you manage multiple topics and edge devices in parallel. Future blogs will describe how to use SmartModules to perform analytics and control independent devices in a large deployment.

That’s it for this post, be sure to join or community on Discord if you want to talk to us or have any questions. Until next time!

Further reading