DHT22 sensor web server on ESP8266

There are plenty of projects using digital temperature and humidity sensors such as DHT11 or DHT22 and various development boards. I'll try to make this one a bit different. A common thing that I didn't like about projects using sensors and web servers is the way most users choose to update sensor data. The easiest way is to use a refresh meta tag in the HTML of the web page.

I don't like this. Asking the browser to refresh the document means to request it again from the server and render it on the client's device. I'll use in this article Javascript code which will request a new sensor reading from the server running on the development board and update the specific HTML element. As additional features, I'll add some user-selectable actions when readings reach a threshold.

Compute Heat Index with Arduino and DHT Sensor

The heat index is a parameter that takes into account temperature and relative humidity, to determine the apparent temperature or the human perceived equivalent temperature. Heat index was developed in 1978 by George Winterling and was adopted next year. It is also known as humiture, according to Wikipedia contributors.

To compute this index, you need to know current temperature and relative humidity. An easy way to find both is by using an Arduino development board with a DHT sensor (DHT11, DHT22). These sensors measure temperature and humidity and send it to the microcontroller using a digital protocol. Thus, there is no need for calibration. You can read the values directly from the sensor module. However, you should take into account that the accuracy of these sensors is not the best. DHT11 has an accuracy of +/-5% for humidity and +/-2 degrees Celsius for temperature. DHT22 (AM2302) is slightly better with an accuracy of +/-2% for humidity and +/-0.5 degrees Celsius for temperature. More than that, DHT22 has extended ranges for both temperature and humidity.