Connect a DHT11 Temperature/Humidity sensor to a Raspberry Pi

At GCITS we’re getting familiar with the Internet of Things (IoT). To start with, we’re connecting sensors to the cloud to make use of the real time data.

As a quick test, we want to connect a temperature sensor in our office to our dashboard in Power BI. The first step is to get a reading from the temperature sensor via the Raspberry Pi.

I had a bit of trouble getting this working using the some of the suggested wiring diagrams (it may just be an issue with my breadboard) so I’m posting this here in case it helps someone else.

You will need:

• Raspberry Pi running Raspbian
• A Breadboard
• Assorted wires
• 10k ohm resistor
• DHT11 Temperature/Humidity Sensor

Wire it all up

First step is to wire up your Raspberry Pi to the DHT11 temperature sensor.

Here’s a drawing of my wiring, as well as two photos that should make it clear.

Set up your Raspberry Pi

Once you’re all set, you’ll need to install a library to easily pull data from the sensor. I’m getting started with Python, so I’m using the Python library provided by Adafruit. I found some great instructions in this PDF: https://learn.adafruit.com/downloads/pdf/dht-humidity-sensing-on-raspberry-pi-with-gdocs-logging.pdf

I’ll summarise it here:

Open the terminal on your Raspberry Pi and run the following commands:

git clone https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_Python_DHT.git
cd Adafruit_Python_DHT

This will clone the Adafruit Python Library to your Pi

To make sure you have the correct dependencies to use the library, you’ll also need to run these commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install build-essential python-dev python-openssl

Next you’ll need to install the library we cloned earlier:

sudo python setup.py install

To confirm that you’ve successfully installed the library, test the sensor by navigating to the Examples folder and running the test python script:

cd examples
sudo ./AdafruitDHT.py 11 4