Monday, February 3, 2014

DHT11 with Adafruit Library and Arduino Mega 2560

In this post I will be playing with the DHT11 Temperature and Humidity Sensor with my Arduino Mega 2560. While a DHT22 could also be used, I used a DHT11 mostly because it and it was cheap. I think I got mine for around a dollar. They can also be found it premade breakouts, but there really isn't much to them. As you can tell from the picture in the link, the breakout merely removes the extra pin and adds the pull-up resistor and a decoupling capacitor.

Once you decide on which sensor to buy, you will be faced with yet another choice. What library should I use? There are approximately a lot of them out there. I chose the Adafruit DHT library found HERE. It worked for me (and supports multiple sensors), so I saw little reason to pursue any of the other libraries.
This does NOT work

Now when I bought my DHT11 from Ebay, a picture like this was on the listing. Quite frankly, I don't understand what this is getting at. It doesn't work. While I can't vouch for the rest of the world, my sensor is not analog. It is digital. You can even look at the datasheet.

Correct Wiring:
Pin 1: +5V
Pin 2: Signal. Connect to digital IO with a 5k ohm pull-up resistor
Pin 3: Nothing. Some people suggest grounding it if you run into trouble
Pin 4: GND



Once everything is wired up, open the example sketch. It does about everything I would want it to do, so there is not much to say. Uncomment the correct sensor and upload. Open the serial monitor and get testing. 

There isn't much to say about this sensor. It is slow and probably not too accurate, but with the hard work of making the library already done, this sensor is incredibly easy to use. If you don't like my description of this sensor, there are many others out there at your disposal. If you do like it, I'm glad I could be of help.

-Matthew

No comments:

Post a Comment