INTERFACES Monitor humidity with the I2C bus
Living under the ground has benefits and disadvantages. While the person who treats himself to a subterranean living space starts to appreciate an absolutely noise-free sleeping experience, managing underground real estate challenges even experienced landladies such as my wife. The inspiration for this story struck when she had to travel to Germany for business: she wanted to keep an eye on the humidity and temperature levels of our headquarters.
The development of the semiconductor industry has led to smart sensors which combine a sensing element with conditioning logic. Output is handled via hardware buses such as I2C, the bus which we’ll use in the following tutorial. The Texas Instruments HDC2010 is an excellent temperature sensor; it not only takes care of temperature, but also keeps an eye on humidity. All that is done with a pretty impressive accuracy of within two per cent. While this might not sound like much, it’s the absolute high end of what is currently possible in affordable semiconductor sensors.
Sadly, Texas Instruments makes the HDC2010 in an extremely small package. Soldering this by hand is impossible, and reflowing it with the normal reflow oven is difficult at best. The official evaluation kit from Texas Instruments also is quite pricey, leaving unexperienced designers in a bit of a rut.
Temp&Hum ahoy
Fortunately, MikroElektronika recently started.
