I began this project in March 2025 while I was in my final year of secondary school. It was my first (and, as of now, only) hardware-based project. The idea for it came from my parents regularly complaining about dampness and condensation in our house. My main idea behind the project was to hook up Raspberry Picos in every room of our house to DHT22 sensors and then collect all of their data in a central Raspberry Pi.
I had a slight issue in accomplishing this because I did not know how to do any of it. This was a time in which LLMs were much more prone to hallucinations and, regardless, my main goal in this project was to learn so I did not want to outsource this to AI. For this reason I only really used Claude for recommendations of what hardware and libraries I should use.
This resulted in some awkward mistakes, however, such as when I bought a standard SD card instead of a micro one for the Pi. I wrote the backend in Python Flask and the frontend in HTML because they were the only languages I knew well. I used client and socket connections to transfer data between the Picos and the Pi simply because I had used them before. I did not know how to solder so I placed jumper wires in the pin holes on my Picos to hook them up to the sensors. I had never used Vercel (or any hosting platform for that matter) so I thought I had to self-host the web UI on my Raspberry Pi. For this purpose I used Cloudflare tunneling to avoid having to port forwarding on my home router. Ironically this ended up being one of the most valuable experiences of the project. Now that I am studying CS, I realise that the majority of my class have never actually hosted a website themselves before.
In April of the same year my Computer Science teacher invited me to present my project at an education conference, which was my first time doing a live demo (surprisingly, it worked).
Overall, it probably would have been cheaper to buy a premade device that did the same thing. I have more Raspberry Picos now than I know what to do with really. I probably learned more from this than any of my other projects (probably because of how little I actually knew). The main thing is, it worked. My parents got good humidity readings around the house and I had successfully built something that solved a genuine need for the first time.