To begin with, let’s consider the material I am working with, to have an idea of what can be done with it and what might be needed to build something clever.
First off, my board is a Raspberry Pi 2 Model B (2015), which features neither a Wifi nor a Bluetooth connection. This did cause me quite a few headaches, since connecting wireless turned out to be more complex than I thought.
I am running the Pi using a completely unofficial power supply, which regularly leads the board to print a very ominous “Undervoltage detected” message on the CLI.
I also own an Arduino Uno board, with which I am far less familiar as I cannot use Python to wrestle results out of it. I will still try to get it to work, and report it here.
For the Uno, I got an adapter for MicroSD cards, so that it would be possible to use the microcontroller to log sensor data. I also need to get a fairly small MicroSD card because the Uno cannot handle more than 5-ish GBs of storage.
In my plans, I wanted to access the Pi remotely via wifi using SSH, which is problematic as the model I am working with does not have an integrated Wifi antenna. For this reason, I went to an electronics store and bought the first USB Wifi antenna, without checking whether it would work on Linux devices. Turns out, it didn’t. Which means that I had to look for a different model, and ended up purchasing a (model-name)[model-link].
Since the first idea I got was using the Pi as a thermometer, the first sensor I purchased was a DHT22 temperature-humidity sensor. The version I purchased is slightly different from what I have seen on online guides, but the functionality is the same.
I am looking to purchase another Pi, but since I am still going to use it as a sensor base, I will be getting either a Pi Zero (whenever they become available again!), or a Pico.