Hardware and software requirements

As always, we are going to start with a list of required hardware and software components for the project.

Except for the Raspberry Pi Zero, you will need some additional components for each of the sections in this chapter.

The most important component will be a current sensor, which we will use to know how much current is flowing through the device. For that, we will use the ECS-1030 non-invasive current sensor. The following is an image of this sensor:

The advantage of this sensor is that you don't need to cut anything to measure the current flowing in the device. To use this sensor, and convert the current it measures to a voltage we can measure, you'll also need a 10-Ohm resistor.

However, we can't directly connect this device to our Raspberry Pi. First, the device has a jack connector at the end, so we need a jack-to-breadboard adapter to connect it first to a breadboard and then to Pi.

Also, we can't connect it to Pi because the Raspberry Pi can only read...