Quickstart guide for the IoT QuickStart Environmental Monitoring Kit for Raspberry PI

Travis_Foss · January 6, 2021, 7:45pm

The IoT quickstart kit was set up to be a very quick way of getting an IoT application up and running with little effort.

We have a new kit for this project now available: Click here to purchase the kit

Getting Ready

Setup of Raspberry Pi

To set up the Raspberry Pi, start by inserting the micro SD card into the SD card slot on the end oposite of the USB connections on the Raspberry PI. Once you have the card installed, you can hook up the power supply, keyboard, mouse, and hdmi cable. Once the power supply has been plugged in, the Raspberry Pi will go through the startup process.

Here is a quick overview video on the startup process:

Next the software will have to be updated on the Raspberry PI. Below is a quick video on the process to do this.

Next we will have to download the Machinechat Jedi One Software. Here is a link to download: https://download.machinechat.io/mc-jedione-rp/mcjedi_armv7rp.zip.

Once the software has been installed, shut down the Raspberry Pi and so that the sensor can be connected to the board. Below are the instruction to get the kit up and running.

Step 1: With the power off, install the Sparkfun hardware including the Pi hat, cable and sensor by following the details at this link.

To add all of the parts for this kit to a cart, click the following link:
https://www.digikey.com/short/4tj3q7

Step 2: Setup JEDI One on the Raspberry Pi. Details can be found here.

Step 3: Install the necessary Python packages and example script on the Raspberry Pi:

 sudo pip3 install adafruit-circuitpython-bme280

- Download the Python script found here to the JEDI One plugins subdirectory on the Raspberry Pi. Make sure to “Download ZIP” from Github as Python is sensitive to cutting and pasting.

 #!/usr/bin/python3

# SendBMEtoJEDI.py - JEDI One Custom Plug-in Python script for Raspberry Pi with i2c attached BME280
# Makes values available to JEDI One
# Requires installing Adafruit library - sudo pip3 install adafruit-circuitpython-bme280
#
# v0.2 DRM 05/31/2021

import adafruit_bme280
import board
import busio

# Create library object using our Bus I2C port
i2c = busio.I2C(board.SCL, board.SDA)
bme280 = adafruit_bme280.Adafruit_BME280_I2C(i2c)

# Device ID, Create a unique device name so Jedi knows the source of the data
devID = "BME280Sensor1"

#New print statements that have Jedi tags
print("metric:id=%s,n=Temperature,vd=%0.1f,u=C" % (devID, bme280.temperature))
print("metric:id=%s,n=Humidity,vd=%0.1f,u=%%" % (devID, bme280.humidity))
print("metric:id=%s,n=Pressure,vd=%0.1f,u=hPa" % (devID, bme280.pressure))

- Unzip the file “SendBMEtoJEDI.py” and save it in the plugins subdirectory of JEDI One.

- Make sure the script is executable:

sudo chmod +x ./SendBMEtoJEDI.py

- Test the script:

./SendBMEtoJEDI.py

You should see the sensor values:

SendBMEtoJEDI

Step 4: Now setup the custom plugin data collector and create a dashboard in JEDI One.

Data Collector setup:

Data Dashboard setup:

You will want to explore the many additional capabilities of JEDI One including: Rules and Notifications, Action Plugins, Monitoring, System Dashboards and more.

For additional ideas, projects and tips for Machinechat’s JEDI One, please visit the support site.

Below is a list of documentation that is useful for all of the products in this kit.

Raspberry Pi Documentation: Raspberry Pi Documentation - Computers

Machinechat Jedi One Datasheet: PowerPoint Presentation (digikey.com)

SparkFun Qwiic Hat for Raspberry PI Hookup Guide: https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/qwiic-hat-for-raspberry-pi (digikey.com)

SparkFunQwiic Atmospheric Sensor BME280 Hookup Guide: Qwiic Atmospheric Sensor BME280 Hookup Guide

Raspberry Pi Power Supply Datasheet: T5875DV.pdf (digikey.com)

If you have any questions on this kit, you can post your question to this forum page, or you can reach out to the Machinechat support site mentioned above.