I’ve wanted to monitor room temperature and humidity in my home for quite some time and I recently came across the ESP8266 Wi-Fi microcontrollers that were ideal for the job. Prior to the ESP8266 becoming mainstream, I was considering running a 1wire network over spare phone wires, similar to this weather station setup.
Thankfully, the ESP8266 chips are cheap enough that fitting one in each room of a house is practical. On top of that, people had already made inroads to getting code running on the ESP, including a webserver returning readings from a DHT22 temperature and humidity sensor.
The ESP8266 chip itself includes a Tensilica Diamond Standard core, although documentation is a little sparse. Fortunately, setting up a toolchain is relatively straight forward, and there is a (proprietary) SDK available that allows custom firmware to be built and flashed onto the modules.
Hardware
The hardware I threw together is very simple, and hooks up a DS18B20 1wire temperature sensor and a DHT11 temperature and humidity sensor up to the two GPIOs hooked up to pins on the module. Since I wanted a handful of the the boards, I opted to design the circuit in Fritzing and got a pack of boards from DirtyPCBs. The schematic and board are below:
The schematic is straight-forward; 5V comes in from a USB socket and goes through a 250mA fuse and gets dropped to 3.3V by a TS1086CZ or AMS1117 module. The switch S1 allows the GPIO pin to be grounded to program the module, with the UART pins broken out to a separate header.
Software – ESP8266
The software is quite simple. Using sprite_tm’s webserver code and building on Martin’s additions for the DHT sensor, my code adds a DS18B20 driver and support for the cheaper DHT11 sensor.
In addition to serving the sensor values over HTTP, the code periodically sends a JSON packet over UDP to a logging host (a Raspberry Pi) which stores it in a MySQL database and an rrdtool database.
I noticed after a few days of running, the ESP boards can get quite warm. Although I don’t think it affected the sensors, it seemed sensible to avoid leaving the ESP8266 online if it only needed to periodically log data. Fortunately, there is a “deep sleep” function in the SDK, but unfortunately this requires the RESET pin to be soldered to the RTC pin to trigger wakeups. With the chips spending most of the time asleep, they don’t get warm at all.
Software – Logging
A python script listens on the UDP port for incoming packets, deserialises them, and logs them. The readings from the DHT sensor are susceptible to noise (possibly a bug in the driver), so the script includes logic to reject samples that are outside a window.
RRDTool expects updates for every value at once, so it’s not possible to use a single RRD to store the data from multiple hosts as it comes in at different times. Instead, each host needs its own RRD, so I use a script to create them as I add hosts to the network.
Software – Visualising
I initially used a Shiny app to load the data from the SQL database, but this became unworkable quite quickly; without a lot of spare RAM, MySQL resorts to creating temporary tables on the SD card which is tragically slow.
For quick at-a-glance readouts, I switched to RRDTool. Although it’s not as pretty as ggplot2, it’s lightweight enough to render graphs regularly and serve them as static images, which fits far more comfortably on the Raspberry pi. The script just iterates over each host and plots it for various intervals, saving the images to a webserver’s directory.
Bill of Materials & Cost
- PCBs: $14/12 – £0.78ea
- USB B Connector: £2.51/5 – £0.50ea
- Fuse holder: £1.29/10 – £0.13ea
- Fuse: ~£0.10ea
- ESP8266: £8.36/4 – £2.09ea
- DS18B20: £4.99/5 – £1.00ea
- DHT11: £3.04/5 – £0.61ea
- AMS1117 module: £2.62/5 – £0.52ea
- Switch: £1.99/5 – £0.40ea
- 4.7kR resistor: 2x~£0.02ea
- Project box: £3.36/5 – £0.67ea
That works out at approximately £6.84 (amortising the cost of the PCBs), or £7.93 each for the 5 nodes I built. I’m ignoring the cost of power supplies as I have at least one USB power source and cable in the rooms I’m monitoring. Given there are more GPIOs on board to the ESP8266, there’s also scope for adding more sensors to them later on.
Mathew Hall 