Okay, so I wanted to get some real-time info the other day, like, see the numbers changing right as they happened. No fancy dashboards, no waiting for some app to refresh. Just the raw stuff, live.
Getting Started
First thing, I figured I needed something to measure. Had an old temperature and humidity sensor lying around, one of those cheap DHT ones. Perfect. Also grabbed a little microcontroller board I had spare, an ESP8266 I think. Simple enough.
Next step was hooking them up. Honestly, it was just three wires. Power, ground, and the data pin. Looked up a diagram real quick to make sure I got the data pin right on the ESP board. Didn’t want to fry anything, you know? Plugged the ESP into my computer with a USB cable.
Making it Talk
Alright, hardware connected. Now, needed to tell it what to do. I fired up the Arduino IDE, it’s just easy for these little boards. Found a basic example sketch online for reading a DHT sensor. Didn’t need anything complicated.
Made a few tweaks to the example code:
- Told it which pin I connected the sensor to.
- Made sure it was printing the temperature and humidity to the Serial Monitor.
- Set the delay between readings pretty low, like maybe every two seconds. I wanted it live, remember?
Uploaded the code to the board. Took a minute. Fingers crossed.
Seeing the Results
Once the upload finished, I opened the Serial Monitor in the Arduino IDE. That’s the key part for seeing the raw results live.
And there it was!
Just lines of text appearing, like:
Temp: 23.5 C, Hum: 45.0 %
Temp: 23.5 C, Hum: 45.1 %
Temp: 23.6 C, Hum: 45.1 %
Scrolling up the screen every couple of seconds. If I breathed on the sensor, I could see the humidity number jump up almost instantly. That was exactly what I was after. Raw numbers, updating constantly.
No graphs, no databases, no web servers. Just the sensor talking straight to the board, and the board spitting the numbers straight out to my screen via the USB cable. Sometimes the simplest way is the best way to just see what’s happening right now. Job done.
