Temperature and Humidity measurement is often useful in many applications like Home Automation, Environment Monitoring, Weather station, etc. The most popularly used Temperature sensor next to LM35 is the DHT11, we have previously built many DHT11 Projects by interfacing it with Arduino, with Raspberry Pi and many other development boards. In this article, we will learn how to interface this DHT11 with PIC16F87A which is an 8-bit PIC Microcontroller. We will use this microcontroller to read the values of Temperature and Humidity using DHT11 and display it on an LCD display. If you are completely new with using PIC microcontrollers you can make use of our PIC tutorial series to learn how to program and use PIC microcontroller, that being said, let’s get started.
DHT11 – Specification and Working
The DHT11 sensor is available either in module form or in sensor form. In this tutorial we are using the sensor, the only difference between the both is that in module form the sensor has a filtering capacitor and a pull-up resistor attached to the output pin of the sensor. So if you are using the module you need not add them externally. The DHT11 in sensor form is shown below.
The DHT11 sensor comes with a blue or white color casing. Inside this casing, we have two important components that help us to sense the relative humidity and temperature. The first component is a pair of electrodes; the electrical resistance between these two electrodes is decided by a moisture-holding substrate. So the measured resistance is inversely proportional to the relative humidity of the environment. Higher the relative humidity lower will be the value of resistance and vice versa. Also, note that Relative humidity is different from actual humidity. Relative humidity measures the water content in the air relative to the temperature in the air.
The other component is a surface mounted NTC Thermistor. The term NTC stands for the Negative temperature coefficient, for the increase in temperature the value of resistance will decrease. The output of the sensor is factory calibrated and hence as a programmer we need not worry about calibrating the sensor. The output of the sensor given by 1-Wire communication, let’s see the pin and connection diagram of this sensor.
The product is in a 4pin single row package. 1st pin is connected across the VDD and the 4th pin is connected across the GND. The 2nd pin is the data pin, used for communication purposes. This data pin needs a pull-up resistor of 5k. However, others pull up resistors such as 4.7k to the 10k can also be used. The 3rd pin is not connected with anything. So it is ignored.
The datasheet provides technical specifications as well as interfacing information that can be seen in the below table-
The above table is showing Temperature and Humidity measurement range and accuracy. It can measure temperature from 0-50 degrees Celsius with an accuracy of +/- 2-degree Celsius and relative humidity from 20-90%RH with an accuracy of +/- 5%RH. The detail specification can be seen in the below table.
Communicating with DHT11 Sensor
As mentioned earlier, in order to read the data from DHT11 with PIC we have to use PIC one wire Communication protocol. The details on how to perform this can be understood from the interfacing diagram of DHT 11 which can be found in its datasheet, the same is given below.
DHT11 needs a start signal from the MCU to start the communication. Therefore, every time the MCU needs to send a start signal to the DHT11 Sensor to request it to send the values of temperature and humidity. After completing the start signal, the DHT11 sends a response signal which includes the temperature and humidity information. The data communication is done by the single bus data communication protocol. The full data length is 40bit and the sensor sends higher data bit first.
Source: Interfacing DHT11 with PIC16F877A for Temperature and Humidity Measurement
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Muhammad Bilal
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