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Adafruit Temperature Sensor Comparison

adafruit temperature sensor comparison

Getting back to my IoT projects, I decided to pick up a temperature sensor. While looking through the Adafruit breakout boards, I found they offered nine different digital temperature sensors! This list is in addition to the analog TMP36 temperature sensor, so that’s ten. I needed an Adafruit Temperature Sensor comparison.

With so many options, I quickly found myself getting lost between the various modules. The 10 I found all measured temperature and provided an I2C interface. Except for the MCP9808 board, they all made at least one other type of measurement. The MCP9808 is the cheapest digital temperature sensor breakout that Adafruit offers, and also the most accurate.

I couldn’t find a comparison in my quick search, so I built my own comparison table. Here’s my chart for an Adafruit Temperature Sensor comparison of their breakout boards.

adafruit temperature sensor comparison chart
Updated: 2016-JUL-27
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Blog

Hands-on with Arduino Create and Arduino IoT

Arduino Create and Arduino IoT Hands On 760px

This past weekend Arduino fans celebrated Arduino and Genuino Day 2016. In classrooms, maker spaces, and impromptu meet-ups around the world enginerds got together to learn and create with Arduino. At the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation on Berkeley’s Campus, I first heard that Arduino Create had been launched.

In addition to hands-on learning workshops, there was a display of Arduino/Genuino projects by students. In the afternoon, three Arduino co-founders gave a short talk. David Mellis spoke on Machine Learning. Tom Igoe did his first talk on Technology and Humanities. Lastly, Massimo Banzi talked about IoT.

Arduino Day, Mellis, Igoe, Banzi
Arduino Day, Mellis, Igoe, Banzi

Massimo’s IoT discussion related to the earlier announcement that day of Arduino Create. This new platform has a web-based IDE, Arduino Project Hub, and Arduino IoT.

Excited about the announcements, I spent some time with the hackster.io powered Arduino Project Hub and the Arduino IoT.  Here’s my hands-on with Arduino Create.

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Arduino

MQTT Introduction and Tutorial Part One

MQTT Introduction Part One

MQTT is an easy way for Internet of Things (IoT) devices to communicate with each other. This light-weight protocol can be used with a simple 8-bit Arduino to a Raspberry Pi to a multi-core PC to Amazon Web Services. It is that versatile.

This MQTT Tutorial is broken into two parts. Part one is an MQTT Introduction. You’ll understand how publish/subscribe message brokering works. Next week, Part two will be a tutorial on using MQTT to communicate between a PC, Raspberry Pi, and ESP8266.

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Raspberry Pi GUI Tutorial

Raspberry Pi GUI Tutorial

My favorite Raspberry Pi add-on is the PiTFT from Adafruit. With it, you easily get a Raspberry Pi GUI interface and touch screen. The PiTFT software install is just a few things and it is good to go.

Adafruit PiTFT - Click for more info
Image from adafruit.com

This screen is what I needed for my IoT project. The Pi+Screen will act as the primary controller for all of my things. The problem is I didn’t know much about writing GUI applications in Linux. So what could I do to create a Raspberry Pi GUI?

Python is popular in Pi projects, so I decided to stick with it and find out what GUI toolkits are ready to go. “Ready to go” means they install easily on Raspian and work well on the Pi.

Here is how I got Qt5 for Python up and running to create a Raspberry Pi GUI.

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IoT

IoT: Internet Of Nothing

baldengineer's IoT Internet Of Nothing

IoT (n): Internet of Things

  1. Things that connect with the internet, to share information.
  2. Devices that communicate with each other.
    1. No wait. Nothing does. It’s the Internet Of Nothing!

It continues to amaze me how few Internet of Things (IoT) devices actually communicate with each other. Isn’t Internet connectivity suppose to make it EASIER for things to talk? Computers have been communicating with the Internet for 45 years. Why can’t Light Bulbs from two manufacturers do it?

At some point someone has to come along to “fix” this situation. What is that solution going to look like and how much longer do we have to wait? Let’s get out of the HealthKit era of things talking to each other.

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