Environmental sensing on Arduino

I decided to try out the Sparkfun SHTC3 temperature & humidity sensor on my Arduino.

Hooking up power & ground went smoothly, but my initial assumption was that the sensors connected via analog(?) inputs on the Arduino, one for temperature & one for humidity. Those were not labeled on the board or addressed in the tutorial or schematic I referred to. There instead were inscrutable acronyms written on the board & copied on the datasheet, SCL & SDA. After puttering around a few too many minutes, I turned to the Arduino docs, where I found this tutorial explaining they’re a connection protocol. Pulling up the pinout reference I refer to constantly, I discovered they’re pins on the left side. Mystery solved!

Booting up their example code, the serial monitor revealed the sensor & circuit working smoothly together:

16:07:39.747 -> RH = 36.77%, T = 76.73 deg F
16:07:39.945 -> RH = 36.84%, T = 76.83 deg F
16:07:40.143 -> RH = 36.92%, T = 76.80 deg F
16:07:40.371 -> RH = 37.03%, T = 78.48 deg F
16:07:40.570 -> RH = 37.37%, T = 79.88 deg F
16:07:40.767 -> RH = 38.46%, T = 80.89 deg F
16:07:40.966 -> RH = 40.29%, T = 81.73 deg F
16:07:41.165 -> RH = 42.66%, T = 82.43 deg F
16:07:41.361 -> RH = 45.11%, T = 81.97 deg F
16:07:41.558 -> RH = 47.54%, T = 81.24 deg F
16:07:41.789 -> RH = 49.95%, T = 80.84 deg F

Humans like 40-60% relative humidity, & the room felt on the dry side but unremarkable, so the readings match up with my wild guestimation of the humidity on the IMA floor. I enjoyed perusing the non-math sections of this documentation explaining how the temperature/humidity sensors themselves work.

I’ve written before about how good design takes into account the context in which its used, from ambient light brightness & color mode preference & display color gamut to window size to battery & mobile data preferences. Temperature & relative humidity are not available to web products, but they are on physical ones! For example, iPhone uses internal thermometers to let you know when the device is overheating & cannot safely operate, encouraging you to cool it down. This is a much better user experience than letting the device get fried silently. (It doesn’t play a sizzling sound effect, because Apple is elegant, but my hardware projects could.)

Up next: I used these sensor readings on a website!