Easy question for you! Please help me!

Hello,

I am as new as possible for this, so please don’t cut my throat! I have a Pi 3 B+. I’ve installed Raspbian, and I have successfully logged onto my account and I can see a dashboard with very basic information. When I try to add a sensor to my Pi, my mouse wont let me. It turns to a circle with a line through it.
Remember this is day 1 for me…

My guess is I’m not doing something first. Do I need to wire it up correctly to the Pi, before it will let me add a sensor to my dashboard?
I am using this Raspberry Pi to monitor functions of a machine I built. I want to see shafts turn via a potentiometer show up on my dashboard as graphic. If the values are out of my range I want it to do another function to keep it in my desired range.

But my problem is, I cant get any function to be added to my Pi. Its greyed out so I cant select it ot the mouse turns to circle with line through it.

I also have a Arduino Uno. I got it because I couldn’t tell if I needed it in addition to a Pi3 or if I could use it by its self.

Please help me! Or tell me where I can go to find tutorials.

Thanks!

can you share a screenshot of the sensor circle issue?

NW%201 NW2

For MCP3008 you will have to pi plugins GitHub - myDevicesIoT/cayenne-plugin-mcp3xxx: An MCP3XXX extension plugin for Cayenne and connect the analog sensor to MCP3008 which auto add the sensor data on cayenne dashboard.

Thank you for your fast response! Do I have to put a plug in for every sensor I want to add? There has to be a tutorial somewhere in this. No…?

Hello,

I put the plugin into the Pi and it seemed like it accepted it. It said…
“Unpacking objects: 100% (36/36), done.”
That sounds good to me!
But when I go back to add the sensor to my dashboard, I get the same thing. The circle with the line through it. I don’t believe this is out of my mental reach. I just feel like I’m missing an understanding. Once I get that I’ll stop asking questions and start contributing.

Did you follow all these steps?

It doesn’t restart on its own. And I want to use the default MCP300r chip, so I shouldn’t need to change anything.

IMG_5149

it did restart the service on first command. can you connect your MCP3008 to your pi and then restart again?

Correct… I think.
So I was in my dashboard and saw “Reset” and clicked it. It reset and when I got back to the dashboard I had a bunch of analog IO’s.

So now I should be able to google how to plug in a analog sensor to this MCP3008 chip. Correct?

Analog%20IO

Thank you soooo much for your help BTW! Seriously, you are my hero!!! I was ready to build a catapult and suddenly be free of my frustration! hahaha

1 Like

thanks for your kind words. here is something in return: first follow this tutorial step by step and see if you are getting sensor reading MCP3008 | Raspberry Pi Analog to Digital Converters | Adafruit Learning System and ADC MCP3008 (Raspberry Pi) : 4 Steps - Instructables