For a long time now I’ve wanted wireless temperature sensors scattered around the house and garden reporting their temperatures regularly to a central server. It’s not something I really need, but something nice to have. I’d originally planned to do it with a RasPiO Duino or Arduino nano and inexpensive NRF24L01 radio boards. Albert @winkleink Hickey, a friend of mine, who also runs the Egham Jam put me onto these when he did his buttonflash game. Albert has a useful hobby of trawling ebay for bargain-basement electronics. A few weeks ago he showed me the Wemos D1 mini.
I have multiple Wemos D1 minis. Each one has a TMP-36 sensor being read by the analog port. Every minute, each Wemos reads its sensor and reports the value, via WiFi to a Raspberry Pi on the local network.
The Raspberry Pi is running a lighttpd web server and php5. A short php script is used (a first for me) to log the data from the incoming http “GET” commands from each of the Wemos boards.
That takes care of the data logging. I wanted to be able to view the current data on a web page, so I wrote a short Python script to generate an html page from the most recent data. This script is run every minute using a cron job on the Pi. If I knew php, it could probably be done dynamically using php. But I don’t, so meh!
So the outcome is that, every minute, each sensor sends in its new data, which is logged, a new html file is created and I can always view data in my browser which is never more than a couple of minutes old.
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
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