Connecting and Interfacing Raspberry Pi with Arduino

Hi lovely people! 👋 I am working on a greenhouse monitoring project and I had to connect my Arduino to the internet over WiFi. I wanted to push some sensor data to my server. I could have bought a WiFi shield for the Arduino but why spend more money when you already have a Pi with WiFi card?

I ended up connecting Arduino with my Pi and pushing sensor data to my server through the Pi. The process was super simple.

Step 1: Start serial communication on Arduino

In your Arduino code you need to start serial communication during setup and send some data to the Raspberry Pi. I am using the loop function to send the data every half-second:

void setup(){
Serial.begin(9600);
}

void loop(){
Serial.println(“Welcome to Arduino :)”);
delay(500);
}

Add any other code you might need for your project and upload the code on Arduino.

Step 2: Connecting Arduino & Raspberry Pi

Connect the Arduino using the USB cable to the Raspberry Pi after the code has been uploaded to Arduino.

Step 3: Enable I2C on the Raspberry Pi

We need to enable I2C communication on the Raspberry Pi. I2C is a common standard which allows one device to talk to another. You can enable this from the terminal by running:

$ sudo raspi-config

Now select 5 Interfacing Options from the list. Now select I2C from the list and select enable.

Step 4: Write code on Pi to read incoming data

Create a file code.py on your desktop on the Raspberry Pi.