bme280pi: the BME280 Sensor Reader for Raspberry Pi

How to Install bme280pi

1) Enable the I2C Interface

1. sudo raspi-config
2. Select "Interfacing Options"
3. Highlight the "I2C" option, and activate "Select" (use tab)
4. Answer the question if you'd like the ARM I2C interface to be enabled with "Yes"
5. Select "Ok"
6. Reboot

For a walk-through with screenshots see the references below.

2) Install Utilities

1. Install python-smbus and i2ctools: sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y python-smbus i2c-tools
2. Then, shut down your Raspberry Pi:sudo halt .
3. Disconnect your Raspberry Pi power supply.
4. You are now ready to connect the BME280 sensor.

3) Connect the BME280 sensor

4) Install This Module

4a) Installing With pip (Recommended)

You can then install this module by running pip install bme280pi

4b) Installing From Source (alternative to 4a)

If you want the latest version, you can check out the sources and install the package yourself:

git clone https://github.com/MarcoAndreaBuchmann/bme280pi.git
cd bme280pi
python setup.py install

How to Use bme280pi In Your Script

You can initialize the sensor class as follows:

from bme280pi import Sensor

sensor = Sensor()

You can then use the sensor object to fetch data, sensor.get_data(), which will return a dictionary with temperature, humidity, and pressure readings.

You can also just get the temperature (sensor.get_temperature()), just the pressure (sensor.get_pressure()), or just the humidity (sensor.get_humidity()).

Note that all commands support user-specified units, e.g. sensor.get_temperature(unit='F'), or sensor.get_pressure(unit='mmHg').

Using Multiple Sensors

One can also read out multiple sensors using this package. Suppose that the first sensor is located at 0x76 and the second one at 0x77, then you can initialize two sensors as follows:

from bme280pi import Sensor

sensor1 = Sensor(address=0x76)
sensor2 = Sensor(address=0x77)

data_from_sensor_one = sensor1.get_data()
data_from_sensor_two = sensor2.get_data()

Plotting Data Obtained From Sensor

You can e.g. query the sensor every 10 seconds, and add the results to a dictionary, and then turn that into a pandas DataFrame and plot that (requires matplotlib and pandas):

import time
import datetime

import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

from bme280pi import Sensor

sensor = Sensor(address=0x76)

measurements = {}

for i in range(20):
    measurements[datetime.datetime.now()] = sensor.get_data()
    time.sleep(10)

measurements = pd.DataFrame(measurements).transpose()

plt.figure()
plt.subplot(2, 2, 1)
measurements['temperature'].plot()
plt.title("Temperature (C)")

plt.subplot(2, 2, 2)
measurements['pressure'].plot()
plt.title("Pressure (hPa)")

plt.subplot(2, 2, 3)
measurements['humidity'].plot()
plt.title("Relative Humidity (%)")

plt.savefig("Measurements.png")

Reporting Issues

Please feel free to report any issues you encounter at the issue tracker.

References

Bosch BME280 Data Sheet

Raspberry-Spy: Using BME280 sensor in python