Adafruit's New USB Temperature and Humidity Sensor Trinkey Provides Plug-and-Play Logging

Adafruit introduced two new members to the Trinkey family. The USB Temperature and Humidity Sensor Trinkeys are plug-and-play USB-A boards that streamline adding ambient temperature and humidity sensing to any USB host.

Adafruit's adorably sized PCB is the same width as a USB-A port (12.0 millimeters) and only 31.8 millimeters long. The height is 4.5 millimeters, with the tallest component being the reset switch for the bootloader. The far end features a capacitive touch sensor and doubles as a mounting point for a keychain. The board contains a Microchip ATSAMD21E18 microcontroller, an RGB LED (NeoPixel), and a SHT4x temperature / humidity sensor.

The USB Temperature and Humidity Sensor Trinkeys come pre-programmed with firmware that makes them plug-and-play environmental monitoring devices. When attached to a host, they create a virtual serial port and print the temperature, relative humidity, and touch sensor status as a comma-separated values (CSV) string.

Since the device appears to the host computer using a standard USB profile, it should be compatible with a wide range of USB-host capable devices. For example, you are not limited to using this environment logging sensor with a PC or Raspberry Pi.

Reprogramming the USB Temperature and Humidity Sensor Trinkey is straightforward if you need different data, a different format, or a different behavior. Adafruit supports all of Trinkey's components with existing CircuitPython and Arduino IDE libraries.

There are two versions of the Temperature and Humidity Sensor Trinkey available. One comes with a Sensirion SHT41, and the other with a Sensirion HT45. As their name implies, each has a slightly different version of the SHT4x sensor. The SHT45 is more accurate than the SHT41.

Both boards are now available from Adafruit. The SHT41 Trinkey is $10.95, while the SHT45 Trinkey is $17.95 .