The Smart Humidor

July 28, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 16 Comments

humidor

If you’re a cigar aficionado, you know storing cigars at the proper temperature and humidity is something you just need to do. Centuries of design have gone into the simple humidor, and now, I guess, it’s time to put some electronics alongside your cigars.

The design of [dzzie]’s smart humidor consists of an Arduino, WiFi shield, LCD + button shield, and most importantly, a DHT22 temperature and humidity sensor. In a bit of thoughtfulness, only the DHT22 is mounted inside the humidor; everything else is in an enclosure mounted outside the humidor, including a few buttons for clearing alerts and logging when water is added.

The smart humidor reads the DHT22 sensor every 20 minutes and uploads the data to a web server where useful graphs are rendered. The control box will send out an alert email to [dzzie] if the temperature or humidity is out of the desired range.

A Smart Clothes Dryer

May 28, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 52 Comments

dryer6 Here’s a question that will rack your brain: does your clothes dryer stop when the clothes are dry? It seems if you have a machine that guzzles power for one single purpose, you’d like it to stop when its job is done, or for the sake of convenience, keep going until the clothes are dry. Temperature and humidity sensors are cheap, and if you don’t have an auto sensing clothes dryer, a DIY smart clothes dryer seems both efficient and convenient. [Editor from the future: link rot, seems to be here now.]

[Andy] figured when clothes are dry, they stop emitting moisture. Based on that premise, he could monitor the operation of a clothes dryer and either shut off the machine or send a message that it’s time to take the clothes out. It’s a simple enough idea, and with an Arduino and a DHT11 temperature and humidity sensor, it was pretty easy to put together.

The clothes dryer used for this experiment was a self-ventilating model that doesn’t vent to the outside. Instead, it condenses the water in your towels and jeans into a tub to be emptied by hand later. This might introduce a little error into tests, but [Andy] did come up with a way to mount the temperature sensor without modifying his dryer in any way. From the initial data, the ventless dryer might be introducing a little experimental error, but it’s still too good of an idea to not try out with a traditional dryer that vents to the outside. Here’s the code should you want to try this yourself.

Humidity Activated Bathroom Fan

October 6, 2013 by James Hobson 35 Comments

bathroom humidifier

[Andrea] recently moved into an apartment with a few of his friends. Unfortunately the bathroom lacks one of the most important things — A fan. Or at least a window!

Using the case of an air freshener, a simple DHT11 Humidity/Temperature sensor, an LCD, a 12V fan, and ATmel328 microcontroller, he created this handy gadget.

When the humidity in the bathroom passes the 50% threshold, an LED flashes to prompt the user to open the door. After a short delay, one of the transistors flips causing the moist air to circulate out of the room.

We’re surprised the little 12V fan is powerful enough to clear the room, but apparently it helps a lot and can clear the room in less than 20 minutes.

To see it in action, stick around after the break.

Continue reading “Humidity Activated Bathroom Fan” →

Building A Replacement For A Broken Dehumidifier Controller

April 14, 2013 by Mike Szczys 17 Comments

dehumidifier-replacement-controller

We’ve thought of doing a project like this ourselves as the dehumidifier we ordered online runs the fan 24/7 no matter what the humidity conditions. But it wasn’t that [Davide Gironi] was unhappy with the features on his unit. It’s that the dehumidifier controller stopped working so he replaced it with one of his own design. The original humidity sensor was mechanical and simply broke. He used an AVR along with a humidity and frost sensor to get the appliance up and running again.

A DHT22 humidity sensor is polled by the ATmega8 chip and compared to the user-adjustable trimpot value. If it is above that threshold the unit is switched on using one of the relays seen in the image above. The one problem you have to watch out for when using compressor cooled appliances is ice accumulation on the radiator. [Davide] uses a thermistor for temperature feedback, switching the compressor off when it gets below 7C and turning it back on again when it is above 12C.

The replacement still uses the reservoir sensor and indicator LEDs. We, however, would recommend using the watchdog timer on the chip to ensure that it is reset if something goes wrong in the code.

Weather Station Graphs History On Webpage

January 10, 2013 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

weather-station

Kudos go out to [Jose] for his work getting so many different components to talk to each other in this Arduino weather station that using a Raspberry Pi to display the data online.

The components shown above make up the sensor package. There’s an Arduino with a custom shield that interfaces the barometric pressure sensor, real-time clock chip, a digital temperature sensor, and a humidity sensor. On top of that shield is an XBee shield that lets this push data back to the base station. [Jose] also rolled in an LCD character display and a few buttons so that the user may view weather data without heading to the web.

A Raspberry Pi board makes up the other half of the XBee pair. It harvests the incoming data from the radio module using a USB to Serial converter cable. You can see the data log on the webpage linked above. Just choose the “LIVE” menu option and click on “Daily” to get a better overview of humidity and pressure changes.

Sensor Array Tries To Outdo The Other Guys

January 17, 2012 by Mike Szczys 13 Comments

The team over at the Louisville Hackerspace LVL1 is not going to be outdone when it comes to collecting environmental data. They put together this Frankenstein of sensor boards that lets you collect a heap of data showing what is going on around it.

At the center-left a small Arduino clone is responsible for collecting the data. Data storage is not talked about on their write-up, but if that’s an ATmega328 chip you should be able to work out an easy way to store data on the 1k of internal EEPROM. If that’s not enough, there is an I2C bus included on the board making it easy to add a compatible EEPROM.

The sensor on the bottom left should look familiar. It’s a DHT11 temperature and humidity sensor we’ve seen popping up in projects lately. But wait, there’s also a TMP102 temperature sensor; but that’s not the end of it. A BMP085 pressure sensor also includes a third temperature sensing option. Want to see when the lights go on in the room? There’s a CdS sensor and a TSL230R Lux sensor for that. An op-amp circuit can measure the sound level in the room via one of the Arduino’s ADC pins. And finally, an RTC board is used for time stamping the data.

Obviously this is overkill, and we’re sure it’s meant as a test platform for various sensors. All of them have been mounted on the protoboard and wired up using the point-to-point soldering method.

DHT11 Humidity And Temperature Sensor Package

January 11, 2012 by Mike Szczys 55 Comments

Temperature and humidity measurements are a nice addition to many hobby projects. But [Rajendra Bhatt] makes the point that many of these sensors have a price tag that is well above what most hobbiests are willing to spend. He decided to take an in-depth look at the DHT11 sensor; which you can get your hands on for under $3 if you know where to look.

The four-pin device uses a 1-wire protocol. [Rajendra] discusses the ins and outs of the communications, demonstrating the part using a PIC 16F628. It’s a snap to connect to your project, requiring VCC, GND, and a pull-up resistor on the single data line. We’ve already seen it used on at least one project, and hope to see more of this little guy in your own hacks.

Now we found this part listed on eBay for less than $3 (buy it now price including shipping… how can they do that?). But Octopart didn’t come up with any options. If you know how to get this through traditional parts suppliers let us know in the comments.