Creating a lab monitoring station with rPI Zero W

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1

Hi There,

I am new to the IoT world and making hardware solutions so any help/guidance is much appreciated.

I have a project where I am trying to connect 2 waterproof temperature sensors, 1 environmental temperature/humidity sensor and 2 soil moisture sensors to the same PI. My understanding is that 2 temp and one temp/humidity sensors are all one wire so by enabling GPIO pins, they should work directly with the board. As for the soil moisture, I assume that they are analogue. So long and short of it, what is the kit that I need to get to make this work (already have rPI)? Do I need a hat to convert analog to digital or can I use breakout boards and which ones?! Which sensors are good with rPI (as many talk about Arduino)?..etc.

On the other side I am running a ThingsBoard server and sending DHT11 data via MQTT to it so the plan is to have all of these sensors chart live graphs on it.

Many thanks,

Peter

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Hi Peter,

That sounds like an interesting project! Do you know which sensors in particular you’ll be using? We may be able to find some boards that all use the same communication protocol if you haven’t decided yet (I2C is easiest to use with the Pi in my opinion when working with multiple sensors) or even have multiple sensors integrated into the same breakout to save space and optimize the wiring required. Using a Pi means that you will need analog to digital conversion if you’re using the sensors directly. But with breakouts, you can essentially skip this step and just request the data directly from the ‘sensors’ as you need it.

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Many thanks for your reply Bryce.

We are going with pi Zero W and the following

  • 2 x 1-wire temperature (DS18B20 or LittleBird version of it)

  • 1 x DHT22 module for environmental measuremnets

  • 2 x Looking into Gravity: Analog Capacitative Soil Moisture sensor

For ADC, we are looking in experimenting wiht MCP3008 on SPI interface or MCP23008 onn I2C as well as ADS1015 as a quick out of the box solution on I2C in the first instance.

Any advice/guidance/thougts/support/ideas…etc.are more than welcome.

Best,

Peter

4

Hey Peter,

No worries, I’ve linked through some appropriate tutorials for using SPI and I2C on the Pi if you haven’t used those protocols before. Also, if anyone else has suggestions please add them here too :grin:

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