We have one indoor thermometer to tell us the temperature inside of our flat. It is actually a secondary function of an alarm clock, which is not particularly beautiful. I’ve decided to create my own, better looking and more accurate thermometer. I thought, how hard can it be?

First, I started by ordering a bunch of components and wanted to try them out on a Raspberry Pi 3. I put together a simple seven-segment display and a temperature sensor BMP180.

The temperature readings didn’t seem accurate to me and I found in the specification, that the reading can vary ±2°C. So I’ve decided to get a more accurate sensor, the MCP9808.

Then came the time to make it battery powered. It makes little sense to run a Raspberry Pi 3 on a small battery, since it’s a single-board computer and takes a lot of power to operate. In order to save battery juice I needed to use a microcontroller instead. I chose an unofficial variant of the Raspberry Pi Pico, which has a USB-C port, the Weact Studio RP2040.

I also opted to replace the display. The simple seven-segment display would require too many wires and I wanted to make my soldering job as easy as possible. So I got the TM1637, which is on a breakout board.

Now let’s get to programming in Thonny IDE. The biggest decision was whether to use MicroPython or CircuitPython. CircuitPython is a fork of MicroPython by Adafruit. I chose CircuitPython as Adafruit releases the MCP9808 library natively in CircuitPython and it’s the main library I need. There is a compatibility layer for MicroPython called Blinka, but it does not fit into the 2MB flash memory. Fortunately, there is a native CircuitPython firmware for Weact Studio RP2040 and a CircuitPython port of TM1637 library too.

To optimise the energy usage, I set up a deep sleep for 60 seconds. Now it lasts 1 week on two AA rechargeable cells (each 2500 mAh). This is the final code:

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import busio
import board
import adafruit_mcp9808
import time
import TM1637
import alarm
 
CLK = board.GP7
DIO = board.GP6
display = TM1637.TM1637(CLK, DIO, 0)
dead = False
 
try:
    i2c = busio.I2C(board.GP1, board.GP0)
 
    t = adafruit_mcp9808.MCP9808(i2c)
 
    temp = t.temperature
    print(temp)
 
    integerPart = int(temp)
    decimalPart = int((temp % 1) * 100)
 
    display.numbers(integerPart, decimalPart)
except:
    display.hex(0xdead)
    dead = True
 
if not dead:
    time_alarm = alarm.time.TimeAlarm(monotonic_time=time.monotonic() + 60)
    alarm.exit_and_deep_sleep_until_alarms(time_alarm)

I soldered everything together using the venerable Pinecil, which is such a pleasure to use.

Last step was to create a 3D enclosure for the whole thing. I started with a Macintosh-style enclosure, but needed to make it bigger and fit more components inside. After several iterations, I managed to design a fitting box in Blender, print it and assemble the thermometer.

Tags: Microcontroller, Python, soldering