Monitor Temperature and Humidity with Beebotte

This tutorial presents how Beebotte can be used to monitor temperature and humidity of your home or office. We will use a Raspberry Pi to report data to Beebotte and a DHT11 sensor to detect humidity and temperature.
This tutorial assumes that you have successfully registered to Beebotte and obtained your API and Secret keys.

Tutorial contents:

Required Hardware

We will connect a low cost DHT11 humidity and temperature sensor to a Raspberry Pi board and report readings to Beebotte using the Python SDK (REST API). We need the following:

  • Raspberry Pi board
  • Breadboard (tiny one is enough)
  • DHT11 humidity and temperature sensor
  • 4.7 - 10 kΩ resistance
  • Jumper wires

Wiring

Follow the following wiring diagram to setup your hardware:


Create a Channel

Before sensding data to Beebotte, we need to create a Channel. For this experiment, we need to create two resources for humidity and temperature.

In your account home page, click on Create New and follow the instructions to create your channel.


Sending data to Beebotte

We use Beebotte Python SDK to send sensor data to the created channel. We need to specify the API access and secret keys of our account, and to indicate the names of the created channel and resources.

In order to run the code, we need first to install the required packages:

Beebotte Python SDK can be downloaded with:

pip install beebotte

Adafruit Python library to read data from DHT11 sensor (among others) can be downloaded as described here.

#!/usr/bin/env python
############################################################
# This code uses the Beebotte API, you must have an account.
# You can register here: http://beebotte.com/register
############################################################
import time
import Adafruit_DHT
from beebotte import *
### Replace API_KEY and SECRET_KEY with those of your account
bbt = BBT('API_KEY', 'SECRET_KEY')
period = 60 ## Sensor data reporting period (1 minute)
pin = 4 ## Assuming the DHT11 sensor is connected to GPIO pin number 4
### Change channel name and resource names as suits you
temp_resource = Resource(bbt, 'RaspberryPi', 'temperature')
humid_resource = Resource(bbt, 'RaspberryPi', 'humidity')
def run():
while True:
### Assume
humidity, temperature = Adafruit_DHT.read_retry( Adafruit_DHT.DHT11, pin )
if humidity is not None and temperature is not None:
print "Temp={0:f}*C Humidity={1:f}%".format(temperature, humidity)
try:
#Send temperature to Beebotte
temp_resource.write(temperature)
#Send humidity to Beebotte
humid_resource.write(humidity)
except Exception:
## Process exception here
print "Error while writing to Beebotte"
else:
print "Failed to get reading. Try again!"
#Sleep some time
time.sleep( period )
run()
view raw raspi_dht11.py hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Create a Dashboard to display your data

In your account page, goto My Dashboards and click Create Dashboard; enter a friendly name and a short description of your dashboard then add 2 Attribute Widgets and 2 Timeline widgets. For every widget, indicate the channel and resource where data will be read from. Voilà.

If you wish, you can set your dashboard as public.