Getting Started
For help, see the Getting Help section.
Setup the Hardware
Connecting the temperature sensor to the Pi is straight forward. There a bunch of tutorials on the web but you’re looking to connect the following physical pins on the Pi to the following sensor connectors.
| Physical Pi Pin | Description | DS18b20 Connector |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 3.3v Power | Power (red) |
| 7 | GPIO 4 | Data (yellow) |
| 9 | Ground | Ground (black) |
The other thing you’ll need to do is connect the 4.7k Ω resistor between the power and data lines. This acts as a pull-up resistor to ensure that the Pi knows that the data line starts in a “high” state. Without it, it can’t tell if it should start as high or low; it would be left floating.
Soldering a resistor inline can be a bit tricky, so I build a add-on board to make the whole process simpler. See the Add-on Board section for details.
Setup the Pi
For a quick start guide in setting up a new Raspberry Pi, see the Raspbian Setup section.
Once setup, make sure you have the following line in your /boot/config.txt. It will load the GPIO 1-wire driver and any attached temperature sensor should be automatically detected.
dtoverlay=w1-gpio
Older tutorials on the web will also say you have to load the w1-therm module but that seems to load automatically these days.
Setup the Software
In terms of installing, you have two options here.