If you're still using old fashioned thermostat's in your house, then boy do you have some catching up to do! I've found that while I have a digital one built into the wall, it's nice to have one that can roam around the house so you can see if certain areas are cooler than others. In this intractable, I'll walk you through how to set up your own digital thermostat with the LinkIT ONE! This is a great stand-alone application or a jumping point for future projects!

Step 1: Gather Supplies

For our digital thermostat, we'll use just a simple LCD screen to display the temperature, and a grove temperature sensor to record it. You can think of it as having 1 output device (the lcd, to tell us what the temperature is) and 1 input device (the temperature sensor, which tells us what the temperature is!).

You'll also need your LinkIT ONE of course! You can use the battery if you want it to be more mobile, but it's totally fine if you wish to leave it connected to your computer or a wall outlet.

Step 2: Connect Your LCD and Temperature Sensor

We'll use a pretty baseic grove temperature sensor here. It is pretty popular in the maker space. One nifty thing you can do just plug it straight into the grove slot of the linkit one, instead of pulling a breadboard out! You can follow my example image above if you need help.

For our LCD, I am using a Grove LCD. This make it super handy to just plug it in and have something working pretty quickly. Simple plug it into the Grove slot on your LinkIt one and you'll be ready to go!

Step 3: Coding Time!

Time for the Code! Writing to the LCD is pretty simple. There is this awesome library you can download here. that makes coding for it super easy! I've included the code to get your new digital thermostat up and running right away, so go ahead and download and put it on your linkit one!

Step 4: Show Me the Temperature!

Now let's go put it somewhere we want to know the temperature of! Take in mind that the electronics might be a bit stubborn, so sometimes it takes a while to get a good reading. I usually put it in a room and wait about 15 minutes before checking the temperature. That gives it enough time to settle on a temperature it feels good about.