Hello madame and monsieur. I got hold of a serious amount of sensors for the Raspberry Pi that come from THIS kit right here as a gift. Now there's a bit of an issue: I have never ever used the GPIO pins on the Raspberry Pi (mine is a B2, the quad core 32bit with 1GB of RAM) and electronic in general is not something I grasp that well beyond the basics. That being said I ask you, dear community, to help me out to start doing something and suggesting interesting projects to do. Basic things are more than enough and well written guides are really appreciated. I'll be googling too as I wait for some suggestions. Thanks a lot.
2 Likes
If you didn't get the CD with the sensors, it seems like they have links to some information on their website.
http://kumantech.com/help/documents-and-recources_h0037.html
Down the bottom under Raspberry Pi. These tutorials might be a good start since they have supposedly been designed for these modules.
Other than that, i guess you need to figure out what you want to do, find some books or internet guides, and get started.
Do you like robots and have a bunch of Lego / 3D printer?
Do you need to automatically water a pot plant?
Do you need a smart mirror?
There are a few YouTube videos that highlight interesting projects for raspberry pi as well.
1 Like
I got the CD with it but there's basically nothing useful on it, not even the specs and model of every sensor. The code there's on that CD is just some simple stuff for Arduino, that's it.
What I had in mind, to begin with, was just use the humidity and temp sensor combo to measure temp and humidity. Maybe expand the thing with an RGB led that changes colour if the temp or the humidity are not in check.
Also how do I know how to make this sensors work without going online and looking for already done projects? How do I know how to wire and "ping" them to see what they do? I'm really confused at the moment...
Thanks for the answer!
P.S. I also got a t-cobbler extension but I can't seem to figure out how to connect it correctly to the Pi.
I think you should start by getting your PI running, afterwards connecting to it and then lighting a LED.
Mine is already online, doing NAS, SMB, DLNA and something else. I'm now familiar with how it works and I'm rolling to GUI almost since I got it.
I don't have any "simple" LEDs in this kit and resistors. Also I've seen that example and won't get me that far really because it's something someone already made and there a few lines of code just sending an on or off signal. I did that with an SMD at university years ago.
You wont be able to ping the sensors, they connect to the GPIO ports which can be configured as switches or analog to digital converters.
Among those files i linked are a couple of word docs that explain the pin-out of the GPIO and walk through setting up the blinking LED example. This would be the best place to start. (Output signal from Raspberry Pi GPIO pin to LED.docx, How to read Raspberry Pi io pin diagram (GPIO pin graph).docx)
The rest is c or python code for sample projects for each sensor, handy reference.
Yeah, I've seen that thing done a million times as a "first example", I may try it when I get an led and a resistor to do it.
So I can't ping the sensors, I don't have any details on how to use them, on the internet I can only find "make an led blink" or "here's how to send your own satellite into earth's orbit" and no guides in between.
Sorry, I'm getting a bit frustrated at the moment.
Since you do have experience with the PI and Arduino, start by identifying each sensor from your kit and see what data you can read with each. In the process of trying out the sensors, you will get ideas of how to mix them together into your very own project.
Since your kit doesn't come with some tutorials on how to use them, I really doubt that you will find a guide from a 3rd party on how to mix exactly your sensors into a particular project.
Best of luck with your tinkering!
2 Likes
This confuses me. The sensors are not connected via a network or a data bus. They are connected to input/output pins which can be read/written to by your code. You cant ping them. You set up the ports in the code and read their values using the GPIO functions/API.
That's what I was talking about. Sorry if I said something stupid or confusing but, as I said, I'm not familiar at all with sensors and bare electronic components. I only know how they function but not how to use them.
So, this is a big step forward. I can read their values. I'm going to look for that now, thanks a lot!
1 Like
I use a library call webiopi for build projects with RPI works in the 3 models, but the 2 and 3 need a patch for the RPIO.GPIO library, you can build awesome stuff with it, because let you have awesome html stuf with embedded js for the gpio entry, for some sensors you have to build your own plugin but is ok you have to do a function like you do for terminal only you have to return the values as variables or in my case i returned as json variables for web develoment.
check it out.
Greatings from el salvador lml
1 Like
Thanks a lot for your suggestion. I might pick this up later when I figure out how to do basic things just using correctly the sensors and Python.
2 Likes