Light Control Server

NOTE: all the fun stuff is happening on the dev and multinode branches. Check it out!

This application provides a simple RESTful API for manipulating a Raspberry Pi's GPIO pins over HTTP. The two major features are:

Direct on/off GPIO pin manipulation
Scheduled GPIO pin manipulation (via cron)

Pictures of my "rev 1" hardware build are available on Google+.

Initial Setup

Source

First, get the source code from Bitbucket. The easiest way to do this is to do a git clone of the lightcontrol repo (don't worry, it's not that bad -- and making it easier is the list).

git clone https://bitbucket.org/zourtney/lightcontrol.git
cd lightcontrol
git submodule update --init --recursive

Alternatively, you can get a zip file from the Downloads section on Bitbucket. However, you will need to manually install the gpiocrust dependency.

3rd Party Dependencies

Install the following dependencies using the pip package manager.

pip install flask
pip install requests
pip install croniter
pip install python-crontab==1.6

NOTE: you may need to run pip install under sudo.

Edit settings.json

Now edit the settings.json file. Add an entry into the pins array for every GPIO pin you wish to let the server control.

{
  "pins": [
    {
      "id": "1",
      "pin": 13,
      "value": 1,
      "initial": null
    }
    ...

Where:

id: unique identifier
pin: the GPIO pin to control
value: the current pins state. 0 for on, 1 for off.
initial: state to set the pin on server startup. 0 for on, 1 for off, null for no change.

REST API

outlets

GET /outlets/ returns info about all server-managed GPIO pins and their current values.
PUT /outlets/ updates info about multiple server-managed GPIO pins. Useful for batch operations. All fields except id are changeable.
GET /outlets/[id] returns info about a single server-managed GPIO pin. id is that which is defined by the id field in settings.json.
PUT /outlets/[id] updates info about a single server-managed GPIO pin. All fields except id are changeable.

Data will be formatted just like the pin definitions in settings.json.

schedules

GET /schedules/ returns a list of all server-managed cron schedules.
POST /schedules/ creates a new server-managed cron schedule.
GET /schedules/[name] returns a single server-managed cron schedule.
PUT /schedules/[name] updates a single server-managed cron schedule.
DELETE /schedules/[name] deletes a single server-managed cron schedule.

Data will be formatted like the following:

{
  "cron": "0 12 * * *", 
  "next": "2014-02-19 12:00:00", 
  "enabled": true, 
  "name": "Lamp on", 
  "outlets": [
    {
      "id": "0", 
      "value": 0
    }
  ]
}

Running the Server

To start the HTTP server, run server.py from the command line.

python server.py

Installing as a Service

You can make the Light Control Server behave like a Unix service by dropping the service/lightcontrol.sh in your /etc/init.d directory.

sudo cp service/lightcontrol.sh /etc/init.d
sudo chmod 755 /etc/init.d/lightcontrol.sh

Now you start and stop it at any time.

sudo /etc/init.d/lightcontrol.sh start

Running at Startup

You'll probably want the server to run as soon as the Raspberry Pi boots up. To do this, register the service script.

sudo update-rc.d /etc/init.d/lightcontrol.sh defaults

For more details, check out this link.

Clients

Provided

This application comes with the following Light Control clients:

A command line interface (client.py)
A simple web client (http://localhost:5000)

Both of these are currently restricted to controlling four (4) pins. This is a legacy laziness that will be cleaned up in due time.

Mobile

There is a full featured Windows Phone client available for free in the store.