Finding an accurate sensor…

The reason for my desire to build an accurate weather station is that I need to know the humidity and temperature both inside and outside in order to decide when to have windows open or closed, and when I need to run a dehumidifier as well as the A/C in the summer.  My off-the-shelf weather station – which looks beautiful with its full-color LCD, is totally unreliable when it comes to humidity.  Probably the temperature is fairly accurate, and relative pressure is fine.  Humidity is the most difficult.

So I did a search on the internet to discover (if I could) what was the best and most accurate sensor.  The article I found was here:

https://www.kandrsmith.org/RJS/Misc/Hygrometers/calib_many.html

This article convinced me that I wanted to use the Bosh BME280 sensor in my system.  Since the sensor is surface-mounted and tiny, I had to find a PCB board with it mounted on (like in the photo).  Naturally, I went to the new Radio Shack – Amazon.  And sure enough, they had it.  Looks just like the one in the photo, but included the connector so it could plug into my prototyping board.

There was already a library for this sensor in GitHub and other places for Arduino.  I have not yet received the sensors (they are being shipped from China), but hope to get them soon, and try out the code!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *