Throughout this book, you will be dealing with technology that is best suited for the Raspberry Pi but can also be somehow run in another environment, such as your laptop. Sure, the Raspberry Pi's portability plays a big role in its popularity in the IoT space, but the real value comes in its extraordinary interfacing ability through its GPIO pins. These pins can directly connect with most sensors and transmitters that you need in order to sense the outside world. Without these, the next best solution was to find another external facing development board or microcontroller (such as the Arduino) and communicate serially, which compromises both our portability and communication.

In this chapter, you will learn more about the GPIO pins and how to interface and communicate with them on our Raspberry Pi. We will also look at the DHT11...