Hot Enough For Ya? Web-Connected Hackerspace Shares Environmental Conditions

hotenoughCome winter time, the hackerspace can get kind of cold. And in the summer, it can get darn hot! To give members a heads up of the current temperature in the ‘space before making the journey out here, we created a web-enabled temperature/humidity sensor.

The main device is an ESP8266 which reads a DHT-22 sensor. The temperature and humidity information is sent up to thingspeak.com. From there, a quick PHP script in our WordPress Widgets section can read and display the current temperature on the website. Since the DHT-22 can also do humidity, we opted for displaying that as well. Visiting the thingspeak page shows a graph of historical data.

ESP8266 Temperature Humidity

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Making an Arduino Shield for Programming ATTINY Chips

New ATTINY Arduino ShieldMy original ATTINY mini shield was a great idea in concept, and it worked as anticipated. However, since the mini shield was sooo small, it was a pain to make sure that it was lined up correctly on the arduino pins. There was a definite possibility to install it in the wrong pins and I didn’t want to find out what happened when it was plugged into the wrong pins. Here’s the mini shield:

So I decided to redesign the board, making it a little bigger so that it fully fills up 2 of the 4 banks of female pin headers on the Arduino. I’m hoping this will make it harder to screw up installing the shield onto the Arduino.

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Program an ATTINY using an Arduino

attiny adruino shieldAfter recently finishing my ATTINY Programming Shield for Arduino Project, I was getting anxious to start trying to program some chips. Although I was eventually successful, this was definitely a learning experience. I will document what I did on this web page.

Here’s what I used:
Arduino Uno with ATmega168
Arduino IDE 1.0.1
ATTINY85 chip
My DIY ATTINY programing shield (or breadboard)

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