UpCycle IT - R2I - Grove-ON!

UpCycle IT – R2I INDEX:

Blog #10 - Hot2Not

As I had mentioned in blog #9 I am interesting in getting the temperature sensor and the lcd display rolling together since it seems a great duo to work with my project.  Let's see how well they play together with the Intel Edison!

The Base shield is pretty straight forward, with the pin layout it can only appropriately fit one way to the Intel Edison board. 

Grove - Temperature Sensor:

Here is the Temperature sensor that we will use.

Going with the suggestion from our Handy/Dandy info page I used the first Analog port, A0 for our temperature sensor.

In Blog #9 we pulled the Grove Examples into our IDE for our own use.  Here is the Grove_Temperature_Sensor example we will work with.

Pretty straight forward, go ahead and upload it over to your Edison.

Error!!!  Ah, I see that Will Robinson must have switched over to Com8, the Edison does have 2 usb connections and I want to use Com7 for my setup.  So if you get an error you may want to verify you are on the right communications port!

Success!!!  Always the preferred result.

Let's take a look at our Serial Monitor since that is where we will be displaying the Temperature sensor results.

Here we have the basic data coming from out Temperature Sensor.  Yes it is a tad chilly in my office.

Here I actually cupped the sensor in my hand to provide a little more heat to show it adjusting it's data with temperature change.

To make it easier for my American brain I added a line that took Celsius and converted to Fahrenheit.

// Calculate F temp

    float ftemp = temperature * (9.0/5.0) + 32.0;

Finally to make it cleaner, I added some text to explain exactly what was what.

// Print the temperature to the serial console.

    Serial.print("Celcius = ");Serial.println(temperature);

    Serial.print("Fahrenheit = ");Serial.println(ftemp);

Okay let's take a look at that LCD Display and hopefully eventually push our Temperature results to the LCD.

Grove - RGB Backlight LCD:

Here we go, v4.0 even.

Here we have the LCD plugged into the 2nd I2C port per the Handy Dandy info page.  Keeping it simple!

Let's go ahead and load the tried and true favorite, Hello World as an example test.

Hmm, not what I was hoping for.

I tried several other examples and while it looks like the sketch loads fine the LCD does not actually display the appropriate messages.

Looking online I found some references that suggested hardwiring some additional pieces in to resolve this but I want to fully explore Grove first to see if they have updated information.  It seems contrary to their kit idea to have to start throwing additional pieces at their devices that were not included.

So the Temperature Sensor was a success hence the Hot part of the Title.

Sadly the LCD wasn't, explaining the 2Not part.

I am going to keep researching since the LCD seems a perfect part of the kit to use, so stay tuned!