The HackShed crew was recently testing out various sensors when Steve thought it would be a fun idea to task an Atmel-based Arduino board with tweeting the current environmental status of the office.
The Arduino now records the current, minimum, maximum and temperature change as well as humidity – automatically updating its Twitter account every 15 minutes.
According to Steve, the following hardware components can be used for the project:
- 1x Atmel-based Arduino Uno/Leonardo Board (ATmega328/ATmega32u4)
- 1x Ethernet Shield
- 1x Mini-Breadboard
- 1x DHT11 Digital Temperature/Humidity Sensor / 5K Pull-Up Resistor
“I hooked up the data pin on the DHT11 to Pin 1 on the Ethernet Shield,” the HackShed crew member explained in a blog post describing the project.
“That is about it for connecting up the components, it is a really easy solution for monitoring temperature.”
In terms of software, Steve made use of the Arduino IDE, Adafruit’s DHT library and the Arduino Twitter library.
“We have the Arduino tweeting out updates every 15 minutes; this may be a bit much for some people so just alter the delay as needed,” he wrote. “We also added the Update # number to the beginning of the tweet as if you send the exact same tweet consecutively to Twitter it won’t be posted… and if the temperature doesn’t change often this may happen a lot.”
The HackShed’s Arduino is still tweeting away, with streaming updates available here. As Steve notes, it should be fairly simple for Makers to modify the code.
“There are a few handy functions such as getTempChange which will calculate the change in temperature; even with negative numbers, so passing in -10C and -5C will produce a 5C temperature change and passing in 10C and 2C will produce a -8C change,” he added.
Interested in learning more? You can check out the project’s official page, along with the relevant Arduino sketch here.
Atmel | Bits & Pieces 