Raspberry Pi and Dht11 humidity Sensor
This was a small weekend experiment which I wanted to try for a long time. I have tried DHT11 sensor with Arduino and it worked great but with Raspberry Pi I don’t know how well it would work.
Much of what I learnt and did in this tutorial is taken from the below link.
Another link which is a good read can be found here.
Now coming back to the sensors:
The diagram is given below, and I used the 4 pin version. The good thing about DHT11 is that it gives you both humidity and temperature both.
Factsheet for DHT11
- Ultra low cost
- 3 to 5V power and I/O
- 2.5mA max current use during conversion (while requesting data)
- Good for 20–80% humidity readings with 5% accuracy
- Good for 0–50°C temperature readings ±2°C accuracy
- No more than 1 Hz sampling rate (once every second)
- Body size 15.5mm x 12mm x 5.5mm
- 4 pins with 0.1" spacing
The circuit that I setup is based the below diagram
The final setup looked like below:
Basically if you see the circuit diagram you would find following connection.
VCC of DHT11 -> 5v Pin of Raspberry Pi 3
GND of DHT11 -> GND Pin of Raspberry Pi 3
Signal pin of DHT11 -> GPIO 4 Pin of Raspberry Pi3
Thing to remeber is to use a 10K ohm pullup resistor between VCC and signal pins of DHT11 4 pin version or the sensor data will not be fetched. I faced the same issue and even using 1 Ohm did not work.
For the code I used the below Adafruit library for DHT11 sensor which
The code is given below:
In this code we are reading the humidity and temperature information and uploading it to a HTTP endpoint http://192.168.0.8:1880 as json.
To make it more like an IOT experiment I also created a Node-red flow. Now Node red is a great IOT workflow manager where you design the flow by dragging and dropping connectors and it starts working. I used a very simple flow where I read data from an HTTP connection running at http://192.168.0.8:1880 and wrote to a file. The actual sensor data was fetched from a python program and fed to the HTTP connector of Node-red.
The screenshots of the Node-red flow is given below:
Finally when running the example it captured the humidity and temperature data.
Given that this was my one of the first experiments with GPIO pins in Raspberry Pi, I was very happy and plan to do many more such experiments.