Temperature recording with the pi

Wed, 17 Apr 2024 15:09:14 GMT

I have a semi sheltered area that I want to put some plants in but springtime in NE MO is hit and miss and I dont want to damage the plants.
I also have a garage that is unheated that i want to monitor how cold it gets this winter.
So I fixed up raspberry pi zeros to keep a temp monitor of those areas.

installed pi os 32 bit lite version

On it installed pyhon3-pip
sudo apt-get install python3-dev python3-pip
sudo python3 -m pip install --upgrade pip setuptools wheel

Also installed the ADafruit library for the DHT11
sudo pip3 install Adafruit_DHT

Then i came up with a script to read from the sensor and report temp in Fahrenheit and humidity
named it tempf.py
```
import Adafruit_DHT
import time

DHT_SENSOR = Adafruit_DHT.DHT11
DHT_PIN = 4

humidity, temperature = Adafruit_DHT.read(DHT_SENSOR, DHT_PIN)
tempf = (temperature*1.8)+32
print (today, ",", now, ",", tempf, " ,", humidity )
# print (humidity, "%,")
```

2nd found a script to output current date and time
named it dateit.py
```

1. Import the 'datetime' module to work with date and time
import datetime

1. Get the current date and time
now = datetime.datetime.now()

1. Create a datetime object representing the current date and time

1. Display a message indicating what is being printed
print("Current date and time : ")

1. Print the current date and time in a specific format
print(now.strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"))

1. Use the 'strftime' method to format the datetime object as a string with the desired format
```

Then I wrote a bash script to call those 2 and send output to tempout.txt
temprec.sh
```
#!/bin/bash

python dateit.py >> ftemp.txt
python tempf.py >> ftemp.txt

Finally setup a crontab to run it every 5 minutes
crontab -e

*/5 * * * * /home/pi/temprec.sh
```

This could probably be done from 1 single python script but I am just not that good with python.
This works well. I might change to a longer interval for readings.

Output looks like this

2024-09-20 , 10:00:02.247606 , 78.80000000000001 , 64.0
2024-09-20 , 11:00:01.831673 , 82.4 , 61.0