Temperature and Humidity Measurement Using an Off-the-Shelf MEMS Sensor: Beyond Arduino’s Playground

In this work an off-the-shelf, modern, integrated temperature, pressure and humidity sensor was interfaced to a PIC18F4550, a popular 8-bit microcontroller. A bit-banging SPI protocol was implemented. The SPI clock was set to 10-kHz to allow for relatively long distance between the microcontroller’s board and the sensor’s board. Temperature and humidity data stemming from two BME280 sensors were compared with data supplied by a commercial handheld temperature and humidity measuring instrument.