How to make an homemade opensource thermometer with an arduino

It's summer time and all of you are enjoying the vacation their way. It is true that it is hot those day. There is nothing better than an ice cream . But we also need to be careful and know the temperature around you to grab convenient clothes by checking your thermometer. Why not make your own homemade thermometer with a Raspberry Pi board. This is what made a maker called Chelsea alias ''cldougl''. Let's see the steps she took to arrive at the final result.

To start, you need the gather the following hardware:

• 1 Raspberry Pi

• 1 temperature sensor: TMP36

• 1 Raspberry pi wifi dongle

• 1 breadboard

• 1 pi cobbler ( To connect the raspberry pi pins ''GPIO'' and the breadboard)

• wires for the connections

• 1 MCP3008 with a SPI interface (Used to transform the temperature sensor analog signal to digital : Because the Raspberry pi doesn't know how to treat analog signal)

When you have all the materiels, you hook up everything like the following schematic:

On the software side, we need to install modules and dependencies with these commands in your Raspberry pi terminal:

sudo apt-get install python-dev wget https://bitbucket.org/pypa/setuptools/raw/bootstrap/ez_setup.py -O - | sudo python sudo easy_install -U distribute sudo apt-get install python-pip sudo pip install rpi.gpio sudo pip install plotly

Once done, you can now install the 2 scripts ''readadc'' and ''tmp36'' to do the job for you. You'll find the link at the end of the article. The scripts respectively:

• Transform the analog data from the TMP36 ( temperature sensor) to send it to the Raspberry pi pins ''GPIO''.

• Convert the temperature and display it with plot on a graphic in degree Fahrenheit or Celsius.

To start, make sure you have your 2 files ''tmp32'', ''readadc'' and the ''config.json'' in the same folder. You can now go to this this directory with the terminal and type ''sudo python tmp36.py'' to launch everything.

The details for the entire project and the program cand be found with the following link: How to make a opensource thermometer with a Raspberry pi

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See you soon. ;-)