Starting with IoT: Raspberry Pi Temperature Monitoring
Chosen theme: Starting with IoT: Raspberry Pi Temperature Monitoring. Begin your maker journey with a practical, confidence-building project that turns simple sensor readings into actionable insights, helpful alerts, and beautiful dashboards you’ll actually check. Subscribe and share your first graph with us!
Hardware Setup: Raspberry Pi and Sensors
For accuracy and durability, the waterproof DS18B20 is a favorite, especially for outdoor or liquid probes. DHT22 adds humidity but is more fragile. Start with DS18B20 for stable, well-documented 1-Wire readings that are easy to calibrate.
Hardware Setup: Raspberry Pi and Sensors
Enable 1-Wire on the Raspberry Pi, connect data to GPIO4, add a 4.7kΩ pull-up between data and 3.3V, and share ground. Keep leads short or use quality cable to reduce noise, especially across long runs.
Software Foundations: OS, Libraries, and First Readings
Flash Raspberry Pi OS, run updates, and enable 1-Wire via raspi-config. Verify sensor presence under /sys/bus/w1/devices. These simple checks build confidence that wiring and kernel modules are correctly loaded before writing any code.
From Numbers to Insight: Dashboards, Alerts, and Sharing
Pipe data to InfluxDB and visualize with Grafana. Create panels for current value, daily min–max, and trend lines. Add thresholds and annotations for events like door openings. Share a read-only link so family can peek without breaking anything.
Send Telegram, email, or Pushover alerts only when readings stay outside range for a few minutes. Use hysteresis to prevent notification storms. Night mode and quiet hours keep alerts meaningful, not annoying, so you maintain trust in your system.
Publish readings via MQTT and integrate with Node-RED or Home Assistant. Automate fans or heaters when thresholds are crossed. Keep retained messages concise, add units, and document topics so future you—or collaborators—can extend the system gracefully.
Simple calibration rituals
Use an ice bath near 0°C and boiling water near 100°C, adjusting for altitude, to check sensor offsets. Note any consistent bias and apply a small correction in software. Repeat occasionally to catch drift or cable changes.
Placement makes or breaks truth
Avoid direct sunlight, vents, and door edges that swing between hot and cold. In fridges, suspend the probe mid-shelf away from walls. For rooms, use shaded, chest-height placement with airflow to represent what people actually feel.
Noise, cables, and stability
Long cable runs can introduce jitter. Use twisted pair, proper grounding, and stable 3.3V. Add averaging or a median filter to smooth spikes without hiding real changes. Log raw and filtered values for transparency when troubleshooting.
