Blog Archive

Monday 2 July 2012

LED Scrolling Clock, Temperature, & Humidity Environment Monitor

I recently used a Sure Electronics LED Matrix and an Arduino to create a scrolling sign which displays the temperature and humidity from two sensors (one inside, one outside).  It also writes this data to the serial port when asked.  I wanted to get this post up now before I forget where I got the various Arduino libraries that I used, and in one case altered, which I used in the project.
Here they are:
  • The Adafruit HT1632 library on github
  • The changes made by mic159 to the Adafruit library on github
  • I made my own change to the library, commenting the glcdfont.c file and changing the text orientation for my particular matrix, bought from Sure.  This library will be available on github as soon as I tidy it up and publish it.
  • The Arduino playground DHT11 library for the temperature  & humidity sensors I used is here.
  • The project also displays the date and time.  I used a DS1302 realtime clock (RTC).  I used this library to set it and read it in the project.
I have created a github repo and slung all the code that I used up there, including all the libraries I used.  All the original files and READMEs should be there so you can find the originals if you need.

I am also using this idea to make use of a Raspberry Pi I have to display the temperature and humidity on a webpage.  I've set up the Pi already, I just need to alter my Arduino code to match.  The node.js code I used is in my github repo.  The code is simply the code from  Alexandre Alapetite altered ever so slightly to include the humidity sensor readings and to log the output from the Arduino in a file.
I am then also using rrdtool on the Pi to graph the output file from my clock/environment monitor. This is what that looks like.  By the looks of things, it has just started raining. Again.


This is the "final" prototype.  I've put it all together on a Arduino prototyping shield so I can unplug it and use the Arduino on something else when I need to.
The "finished" article.  I need to get a nicer proto board and get out my soldering iron






The pin connections on the LED Matrix

Here's the mandatory YouTube video: