Why automation runs tasks without human intervention in Raspberry Pi - See It in Action

Why Automation Runs Tasks Without Human Intervention

📖 Scenario: Imagine you have a Raspberry Pi at home that controls your garden lights. You want the lights to turn on automatically at sunset and turn off at sunrise without you pressing any buttons.

🎯 Goal: Build a simple program that shows how automation can run tasks on a Raspberry Pi without needing a person to do it every time.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a dictionary with exact times for sunset and sunrise

Add a variable to hold the current time

Use a for loop to check if the current time matches sunset or sunrise

Print the action taken (turning lights on or off)

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Automation helps devices like Raspberry Pi run tasks like turning lights on/off without needing you to do it manually every time.

💼 Career

Understanding automation basics is useful for jobs in IoT, home automation, and embedded systems programming.

1

DATA SETUP: Create a dictionary with sunset and sunrise times

Create a dictionary called times with these exact entries: 'sunset': 18 and 'sunrise': 6 representing hours in 24-hour format.

Raspberry Pi

# Create the dictionary called times with sunset and sunrise hours
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use curly braces {} to create a dictionary with keys 'sunset' and 'sunrise'.

2

CONFIGURATION: Add a variable for the current time

Create a variable called current_time and set it to 18 to represent the current hour.

Raspberry Pi

times = {'sunset': 18, 'sunrise': 6}
# Create the variable current_time and set it to 18
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Just assign the number 18 to the variable current_time.

3

CORE LOGIC: Check if current time matches sunset or sunrise

Use a for loop with variable event to iterate over times. Inside the loop, use an if statement to check if current_time equals times[event]. If yes, create a variable action and set it to 'Turn lights on' if event is 'sunset', else set it to 'Turn lights off'.

Raspberry Pi

times = {'sunset': 18, 'sunrise': 6}
current_time = 18
# Use a for loop to check if current_time matches sunset or sunrise
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Loop over the keys in times, compare current_time with each value, and set action accordingly.

4

OUTPUT: Print the action taken

Write a print statement to display the value of the variable action.

Raspberry Pi

times = {'sunset': 18, 'sunrise': 6}
current_time = 18
for event in times:
    if current_time == times[event]:
        if event == 'sunset':
            action = 'Turn lights on'
        else:
            action = 'Turn lights off'
# Print the action variable
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use print(action) to show the result.