An Integrated sensor module usually contains one or more elementary electronic components and additional hardware nicely designed and placed on a PCB unit. These chip-based sensor devices usually take care of the basic measurement and calculations required to arrive at a final measurement. When using these sensor devices, all one has to do is utilize a corresponding Arduino library that has been specifically written for the chip-based sensor device. In turn, the library hides all implementation details of the actual method of measuring the sensor values. We will look at one such example in this book. You will learn how to use a common temperature sensor module, known as DHT11. Additionally, in the last part of the chapter, we will work with another type of integrated sensor that does not require a specific Arduino library.

For using integrated sensor modules, in general, the following sequence of basic steps should be followed:

1. Step 1: Download the datasheet of the integrated sensor module.
2. Step 2: Determine the connection method of the integrated sensor module with a microcontroller (Arduino Uno, in this case).
3. Step 3: Install sensor, specific Arduino library.
4. Step 4: Write and load the Arduino sketch using the sensor's Arduino library functions.
5. Step 5: Connect the sensor to the Arduino board, as per the datasheet.

To start, one must refer to the datasheet of the integrated sensor module. As explained earlier in this chapter, the datasheet contains all the technical specifications of the integrated sensor module. A special area of interest in our case would be to understand how to connect the sensor to the Arduino board. As we proceed through this chapter, we will see how we can use the information in a datasheet.