Ardunio and the SHT15

For my ongoing thermostat project I require some sort of temperature and humidity sensor. Because I'm fairly new to all this I decided to get a 2 in 1 sensor from Robotshop called the SHT15. I went with the SHT15 because it had both a temperature and humidity sensor and uses a "digital 2-wire" interface. When I first purchased it I didn't realize that "digital 2-wire" didn't mean I2C, but that's another story.

In order to get the sensor to communicate with the Arduino I needed to write some custom code that manipulates the data and clock lines by pulling them high and low at the correct times. I haven't had any experience doing this before so it was a learning experience for me.

Connecting the SHT15 to the Arduino is pretty simple. The data and sck lines each goto a digital input/output on the Arduino and the VCC goes to +5V. Pretty simple. Here is a picture of my breadboard.



As you can see I had to solder on some breadboard wires onto the SHT15 breakout board. It's been a while since I've soldered so it was good practice. NOTE: You can decouple the power supply pings (VCC, GND) with a 100nF capacitor.

Onto the code! As I said before I used the C source code from the website to help me with getting all the timing right. After a few short hours of some frustration I was able to get it working. One thing I didn't get working was outputting the actual temperature/humidity values in human readable form. The numbers that the SHT15 returns require you to plug them into a formula before they will make sense to us. The formulas can be found in the SHT15 datasheet. There are a few functions that I have yet to implement such as the heater but it shouldn't be too difficult.

Here is my source code (now on GitHub): serial_temp_humidity.pde

Enjoy! Feel free to ask me any questions. I'm out.