iot

There’s something very exciting when working directly with hardware as a professional dotnet software developer that has spent over a decade developing for desktop, mobile, and web. It feels great being able to put my code on a small, low-powered, resource-constrained Microcontroller and have it solve a specific problem I have… or just do fun little projects. After all, it’s why I got into programming in the first place. This blog post is to document how this project came to be and what I had to do to get to the finish line....

Why My room’s AC unit (Panasonic) is quite old. It does a great job cooling/heating the place after all these years, but also lacks any “smart” capabilities found on modern units. Personally, I am not a fan of making everything at my home internet-connected for reasons I won’t delve into now, and I certainly don’t want my AC unit to be internet-connected either. However, I want to be able to expand on its functionality as needed....

I have recently discovered Nanoframework which is a community-led project to bring C# and Dotnet to the world of micro-controllers. Since then, I have been tinkering with IoT and embedded devices using C# to connect with sensors and play around with them. One of the sensors I wanted to try out was the DHT22. This sensor has 3 pins you need to connect: a VCC pin (3.3v to 5.5v), a signal/trigger pin, and a ground pin....