Using 1-wire DS1820 sensors on the RaspberryPI

How to use DS18x20 1-wire temperature sensors with the Raspberry PI

Original date : 2013-02-03

The Raspberry PI (rPI) has several different serial buses brought out on its GPIO (General Purpose Input/Output) pins, including SPI and I²C, however there is no 1-Wire interface. Luckily, in modern Linux Kernels there is a driver module for bit-banging a 1-Wire interface using a single GPIO pin. In recent [http://www.raspbian.org/ Raspbian “wheezy”] releases GPIO-4 is the pin used. The rest of this article will describe how to use this module and connect DS18x20 series 1-Wire temperature sensors to the rPI.

I built my breakout interface directly onto a plastic pin header for testing purposes, but this is hardly the best way to do it.

Hardware

To interface a DS18x20 sensor to the rPI, the bare minimum hardware you need is a single 4.7K resistor, the DS18x20 sensor and a plug that will fit the rPI GPIO pins. The wiring diagram is show below, along with a some photographs of the parts I soldered together for this experiment. I used a now-obsolete DS1820 sensor, but modern Ds18s20 and DS18b20 will work the same way (and offer more features and more precise temperature readings).

I built my breakout interface directly onto a plastic pin header for testing purposes, but this is hardly the best way to do it.

Connection diagram for a DS1820 1-wire sensor on Raspberry PI

1-Wire interface for Raspberry PI build on a pin-header

Interface mounted on Raspberry PI GPIO pins

Software

The 1-Wire drivers are not loaded by default when the rPI boots. You can load them with the following commands from a command prompt:

  
  pi@raspberrypi:~$ sudo modprobe wire
  
  pi@raspberrypi:~$ sudo modprobe w1-gpio
  
  pi@raspberrypi:~$ sudo modprobe w1-therm 
  

Connect the sensor hardware to the rPI and check it is detected by seeing if a device is listed on the 1-Wire bus.

  
  pi@raspberrypi:~$ cat /sys/bus/w1/devices/w1_bus_master1/w1_master_slave_count
  

This will print the number of sensors detected, 1 - for my hardware at the moment. You can get the sensor ID (a hexadecimal string stored in ROM on the sensor chip) by reading the w1_master_slaves file:

  
  pi@raspberrypi:~$ cat /sys/bus/w1/devices/w1_bus_master1/w1_master_slaves
  

A quick check for correct operation of the sensor is to “read” the sensor file, you’ll need the hex ID of the sensor from earlier commands

  
  pi@raspberrypi:~$ cat /sys/bus/w1/devices/10-00080234149b/w1_slave
  
      > 37 00 4b 46 ff ff 07 10 1e crc=1e YES
  
      > 37 00 4b 46 ff ff 07 10 1e t=27312
  

Unfortunately, at the time of wiring this article (December 2012) the very useful OWFS (OneWire File System) software is incompatible with the w1-gpio kernel drivers, so you can’t yet use the nice owfs tools to explore and retrieve data from sensors connected to the rPI this way.

Perl

Reading the sensors on the command line with cat isn’t very useful, so I use this perl script

#!/usr/bin/perl
$mods = `cat /proc/modules`;
if ($mods =~ /w1_gpio/ && $mods =~ /w1_therm/)
{
 print "w1 modules already loaded \n";
}
else 
{
print "loading w1 modules \n";
$mod_gpio = `sudo modprobe w1-gpio`;
$mod_them = `sudo modprobe w1-therm`;
}

$sensor_temp = `cat /sys/bus/w1/devices/10-*/w1_slave 2>&1`;
if ($sensor_temp !~ /No such file or directory/)
{
if ($sensor_temp !~ /NO/)
{
        $sensor_temp =~ /t=(\d+)/i;
        $temperature = (($1/1000)-6); # My sensor seems to read about 6 degrees high, so quick fudge to fix value
      
        print "rPI temp = $temperature\n"; 
        exit;
}
die "Error locating sensor file or sensor CRC was invalid";

}

This script doesn’t really do any sensible error checking. It does look to make sure the needed driver modules are loaded, and it does try to make sure it can read the sensor data file, however if the sensor becomes unavailable, or disconnected, the script fails. It only logs data for a single sensor, and is hard-coded to only log data from DS1820 parts (for DS18s20 or DS18b20, the script needs the first part of these sensors’ ID).

Archiving and graphing temperature readings with RRDtool

To make the sensors useful you really want more than a single reading, you want a time series, and some way to investigate the data you collect. RRDtool is designed for just this type of thing. It’s a database you can put temperature readings into, and a graphing program that can present the readings in interesting ways.

This is how Ive set up RRDtool to log the temperature every five minutes and produce hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and yearly graphs.

First off you need RRDtool installed and then create the initial database to store readings.

  
  pi@raspberrypi:~/sudo apt-get install rrdtool
  
  pi@raspberrypi:~/rrdtool create rPItemp.rrd --step 300 DS:temp:GAUGE:600:-30:50 RRA:AVERAGE:0.5:1:12 RRA:AVERAGE:0.5:1:288 RRA:AVERAGE:0.5:12:168 RRA:AVERAGE:0.5:12:720 RRA:AVERAGE:0.5:288:365
  

This creates a database with a base data interval of 5 minutes (300s), with a data range of -30 to +50 (degrees C), and some calculated averages for hour, day, week, month and year.

A shell script then interrogates the database and produces some graphs.

#!/bin/bash
RRDPATH="/home/pi/temperature/"
RAWCOLOUR="#FF0000"
TRENDCOLOUR="#0000FF"


# Edited 2012/12/9 to add running averages to hourly and daily graphs

#hour
rrdtool graph $RRDPATH/hour.png --start -6h \
DEF:temp=$RRDPATH/rPItemp.rrd:temp:AVERAGE \
CDEF:trend=temp,1800,TREND \
LINE2:temp$RAWCOLOUR:"Hourly Raspberry PI temperature" \
LINE1:trend$TRENDCOLOUR:"30 min average"

#day
rrdtool graph $RRDPATH/day.png --start -1d \
DEF:temp=$RRDPATH/rPItemp.rrd:temp:AVERAGE \
CDEF:trend=temp,21600,TREND \
LINE2:temp$RAWCOLOUR:"Daily Raspberry PI temperature" \
LINE1:trend$TRENDCOLOUR:"6h average"

#week
rrdtool graph $RRDPATH/week.png --start -1w \
DEF:temp=$RRDPATH/rPItemp.rrd:temp:AVERAGE \
LINE2:temp$RAWCOLOUR:"Weekly Raspberry PI temperature" \

#month
rrdtool graph $RRDPATH/month.png --start -1m \
DEF:temp=$RRDPATH/rPItemp.rrd:temp:AVERAGE \
LINE1:temp$RAWCOLOUR:"Monthly Raspberry PI temperature" \

#year
rrdtool graph $RRDPATH/year.png --start -1y \
DEF:temp=$RRDPATH/rPItemp.rrd:temp:AVERAGE \
LINE1:temp$RAWCOLOUR:"Yearly Raspberry PI temperature" \

The perl sensor reading code is modified to send the tempreature reading to the database as well as to the screen.

#!/usr/bin/perl
$mods = `cat /proc/modules`;
if ($mods =~ /w1_gpio/ && $mods =~ /w1_therm/)
{
 print "w1 modules already loaded \n";
}
else 
{
print "loading w1 modules \n";
$mod_gpio = `sudo modprobe w1-gpio`;
$mod_them = `sudo modprobe w1-therm`;
}

$sensor_temp = `cat /sys/bus/w1/devices/10-*/w1_slave 2>&1`;
if ($sensor_temp !~ /No such file or directory/)
{
if ($sensor_temp !~ /NO/)
{
        $sensor_temp =~ /t=(\d+)/i;
        $tempreature = (($1/1000)-6); # My sensor seems to read about 6 degrees high, so quick fudge to fix value
        $rrd_out = `/usr/bin/rrdtool update  /home/pi/temperature/rPItemp.rrd N:$tempreature`;


        print "rPI temp = $tempreature\n";
        exit;
}
die "Error locating sensor file or sensor CRC was invalid";

}

All that’s needed is to run the perl sensor reading code and the graph generating script every five minutes from a cron job. My contab looks like this:

# For more information see the manual pages of crontab(5) and cron(8)
#
# m h dom mon dow command
*/5 * * * * /home/pi/temperature/get_temp.pl
*/5 * * * * /home/pi/temperature/graph_temp.sh 

Where get_temp.pl is the perl sensor code, and graph_temp.sh plots the graphs.

The following two graphs used to be live data when the rPi was running, but it has since 2021 been replaced by a different system.

Extra stuff

All the perl and shell scripts used in this article can be downloaded here