Temperature-humidity sensor

Temperature & Humidity

Description

This post will outline how I built some temperature-humidity sensors for my home automation setup to use in a couple rooms in my house.  I'll explain some of the options I tried before coming to my final design.  I will also give you links to where you can purchase the parts and to download the 3D printer files for the enclosure.

Introduction

This originally started from an idea I had for my home automation setup to put a temperature and humidity sensor in my main bathroom.  The main reason for this was to help a small problem with occasional small mold spots on my ceiling.  This was most likely due to humidity in the bathroom.  When someone would take a shower, they would turn on the vent fan before showering, and then off shortly after.  The problem is that when the vent fan is shut off, there still may be excess humidity in the room that could eventually cause the mold.

The idea was that I could have a controller on the vent fan for the bathroom that would turn on when the humidity reached a certain level, and then would also turn off when below another level.  The two levels would factor in some hysteresis to the equation to prevent the fan from continually starting and stopping when the humidity is near a certain level.   By doing this, the humidity in the room would be dropped to a safe level before shutting off, thus preventing the mold problem.

The temperature-humidity sensor design ideas

So I needed to figure out everything I would need for the project.  My primary home automation setup revolves around MySensors nodes.  Those nodes talk to my Vera Plus automation controller.  I decided to make the temperature and humidity sensor a MySensors node.  The exhaust fan control, which I have yet to do, will be controlled by a converted Sonoff module.  For this article i'll focus on the Temperature and humidity sensor. 

Below is a list of the things I needed to create the sensor.  The basic list was simple

  • A circuit board for the project.  
  • A micro-controller to control the sensor.
  • A temperature and humidity sensor.
  • Some kind of power source.
  • An enclosure to mount the sensor to the wall.

On to building the prototype

Easy/Newbie PCBFor the circuit board, I had a number of the MySensors Easy/Newbie circuit boards, so I thought that would be a good choice.  For that board I needed an Arduino Pro Mini, and an nRf24L01+ radio.  

Now I needed to choose a temperature-humidity sensor.  I had both some DHT11 and some DHT22 sensors.  The DHT22 is a higher resolution sensor, so I originally decided to try that one.  Through some testing with the DHT22 sensor I found that the power consumption was too high.  HDC1080 thumbnailI did some looking and found the HDC1080 sensor.  This sensor connects to the I2C bus and uses very low power.  It's low power consumption made it ideal for use on a battery operated node.   By removing the regulator and power LED from the Pro Mini I was able to run this sensor for a week with no significant power drain on a set of 2 - AA batteries.

The last piece of the puzzle was an enclosure.  The enclosure had to be vented since I was measuring temperature and humidity.  It also needed to be able to hold a battery  or set of batteries.  I figured that I should find the battery box first, and then design the sensor enclosure around that and the PCB.  I settled on this one.

The enclosure design

I have dealt with temperature sensor enclosures before, so I had some ideas on what the enclosure should look like.  temperature-humidity wall boxI turned to OpenSCAD and came up with a basic design.  The box was vented, it had mounting tabs for the PCB and a place to hold the battery box.  temperature-humidity wall plateI decided to make it easy to remove from the wall if needed and made the wall plate with two tabs that the cover could lock on to. 

Since the creation of the first prototype wall box, I have done a couple revisions to the design.  This is what the final design looks like.temperature-humidity wall box V3
Version 3 of the wall box is highly configurable and can be adapted to other configurations if needed.  All versions of the wall box can be found on my thingiverse page https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2186286

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My personal weather station

Description

For a while now I have wanted to add a personal weather station to my home automation system. The idea was to use the data collected for things like controlling when my lawn sprinklers run.  I also plan on using temperature and humididty data to determine things like heating and cooling (HVAC) operations. In this post I will log the ongoing details of my modular personal weather station project. With the help of my new Anet A8 3D printer that I purchased earlier this year, I was able to use it to build all of the parts needed for the project. The project was started a while ago, but I didn't have a place at the time to post my progress, so here it is.

Details

So far I am working on 4 parts to the weather station. Wind speed anemometer, wind direction vane, rainfall gauge and a temperature and humidity sensor. All sensors need to communicate to my home automation system over my MySensors network. I am hoping that I can control all data collection with a single arduino pro mini built on a MySensors Easy/Newbie PCB created by Sundberg84 from the MySensors forum. In this post I will outline each modular section of the project. All of the 3D printed parts for this have been designed in OpenSCAD and will eventually be posted on my thingiverse page.  This post is a work in progress.  Check back to see more information.

 The anemometer and wind direction vane

 The first part of the project that I started with was a combination of two sensors.  An anemometer for measuring wind speed and a wind vane for determining wind direction.weather station wind sensor This is the first prototype design of the 3D printed parts.  Some minor changes have been made since this design.  The first was to invert the center mount sections so the screws screwed in from the bottom.  This put the wind direction vane on the  piece with the square mounting peg and the anemometer was moved to the other piece.  The reason for this was to keep rain from collecting in the small screw recesses and potentially getting inside the case.  The next change which I am in the process of printing as I write this, is a new piece with a round mounting peg instead of a square one.  This was done because of a later decision to mount everything using schedule 40 PVC electrical conduit.weather station wind speed sensor rotor

The anemometer is mounted with a ball bearing that is press fit into the cap.  The shaft, a 1/4 x 20 bolt with a small rotor that has a magnet mounted in one end and that will pass by a magnetic reed switch.  The arduino will use the counted pulses from the reed switch to determine the wind speed. The anemometer cup design was borrowed from a project on thingiverse, but I can't seem to find the original that I used.  The cups, arms and main shaft attachment are all separate printed parts that I have glued together.  This made for an easier build on my 3D printer.

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