Owen McGinley
The main screen of How Hot Is It In My Dorm Room?(!) Up in the top box, it shows the last reading of the temperature, down to 2 decimal places. Below that, the latest humidity reading is shown. Additionally, the difference between the outdoor tempe

How Hot Is It In My Dorm Room?

Piggybacking off of the work from PyWeather 2, How Hot Is It In My Dorm Room? answers the question I had one afternoon. Based entirely off of WebWork Status (they look basically the same), with some very rough code modifications, I can now finally answer that question!

Data is collected from the I2C sensor on PyWeather 2, dumped to DynamoDB every 5 minutes (when the display updates), and then the Flask-based server reads the DynamoDB data to render a webpage.

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Lines of code: ~400 (not including PyWeather 2)

Languages: HTML, JavaScript, Python

Frameworks: Materialize (based on Bootstrap 4), Flask

Timeframe: About 3-4 days

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You can view the source code for this project here.

The main screen of How Hot Is It In My Dorm Room?(!) Up in the top box, it shows the last reading of the temperature, down to 2 decimal places. Below that, the latest humidity reading is shown. Additionally, the difference between the outdoor tempe

The main screen of How Hot Is It In My Dorm Room?(!) Up in the top box, it shows the last reading of the temperature, down to 2 decimal places.

Below that, the latest humidity reading is shown. Additionally, the difference between the outdoor temperature/humidity is shown. In this case, the dorm room is hotter than outside by 20.52 degrees F, and less humid by 45.89%).

The dot next to the temperature indicates my relative comfort in the current dorm room temperature. Green (below 77 degrees) means I can stay in the room for a while. Yellow (77-83 degrees) means it’s warm, I might sweat while sleeping, and after a while it might get uncomfortable. Red (83+ degrees) means I should probably study elsewhere on campus and avoid my dorm room.

Below the first box with all the details, the barrage of (6!) graphs come next. The first graph is pretty obvious, the historical temperature (over 72 hours). You can see the temperature dip at night, then increase during the day, before dipping af

Below the first box with all the details, the barrage of (6!) graphs come next.

The first graph is pretty obvious, the historical temperature (over 72 hours). You can see the temperature dip at night, then increase during the day, before dipping after the sun goes down.

The next graph shows the relative humidity in the room over 72 hours.

The next graph shows the relative humidity in the room over 72 hours.

Next up is the historical temperature difference between the indoor and outdoor temp. This data is derived on the Dark Sky data that is fetched every 15 minutes (so you get a “sawtooth”/step like pattern when the sun is setting and things change rap

Next up is the historical temperature difference between the indoor and outdoor temp. This data is derived on the Dark Sky data that is fetched every 15 minutes (so you get a “sawtooth”/step like pattern when the sun is setting and things change rapidly).

And a similar graph for the difference in humidity from outside to inside. Of course, the humidity inside will almost always be lower than the humidity outside (there’s no humidifier in the room). But it’s interesting to see how the difference betwe

And a similar graph for the difference in humidity from outside to inside. Of course, the humidity inside will almost always be lower than the humidity outside (there’s no humidifier in the room). But it’s interesting to see how the difference between indoor/outdoor RH changes over time.

The next, very cool graph is the temperature difference over the last 24 hours. Very useful to see if the dorm room is cooling down over time. For any time on the graph, it gets compared to the data point that occurred 24 hours before - so this grap

The next, very cool graph is the temperature difference over the last 24 hours. Very useful to see if the dorm room is cooling down over time. For any time on the graph, it gets compared to the data point that occurred 24 hours before - so this graph can only have a 48 hour history.

Negative numbers mean the room is cooler compared to the day before at that time, positive numbers mean the room is hotter compared to the day before at that time.

The last graph is very similar to the previous image, now just with relative humidity. When I was taking these screenshots, the relative humidity had increased by a lot compared to the previous day, and that’s reflected by the values in this graph.

The last graph is very similar to the previous image, now just with relative humidity. When I was taking these screenshots, the relative humidity had increased by a lot compared to the previous day, and that’s reflected by the values in this graph.

Overall, How Hot Is It In My Dorm Room? is a pretty awesome project to keep track of my dorm room’s environment (since it isn’t climate controlled). I can see with definitive evidence if doing certain things helps to cool down, or heat up the room, and make adjustments as necessary.