The DS18B20 is a popular temperature sensor that uses the 1-Wire protocol for communication. Recent versions of the Linux kernel include a kernel driver for this protocol, making it relatively convenient to connect one or more of these devices to a Raspberry Pi or similar device. 1-Wire devices can be daisy chained, so it is possible to connect several devices to your Pi using only a single GPIO pin, and you’ll find many articles out there that describe how to do so.

Occasionally, it may be necessary to have more than a single chain of connected devices. For example, you may have reached the limits on the size of your 1-Wire network, or you may simply need to route your cables in a way that makes a single chain difficult. You can enable multiple 1-Wire buses on your Raspberry Pi to handle these situations.

For a single 1-Wire bus, you add the following to /boot/config.txt:

dtoverlay=w1-gpio

This will enable the 1-Wire bus on GPIO 4. To enable multiple 1-Wire buses, you will use multiple dtoverlay statements and the gpiopin parameter to the w1-gpio overlay. For example, to enable 1-Wire buses on GPIO 4 and GPIO 17, you would use:

dtoverlay=w1-gpio,gpiopin=4
dtoverlay=w1-gpio,gpiopin=17

In the picture at the top of this post, there are four DS18B20 sensors. Three are connected to the 1-Wire bus on GPIO 4, and one is connected to the 1-Wire bus on GPIO 17. Looking in /sys/bus/w1/devices, I see two w1_bus_master devices (and the four temperature sensors):

$ ls /sys/bus/w1/devices/
28-041722cbacff  28-0417231547ff  w1_bus_master1
28-041722ce24ff  28-04172318c0ff  w1_bus_master2

I can check the temperature on all four devices like this:

$ cat /sys/bus/w1/devices/28-*/w1_slave
50 01 4b 46 7f ff 0c 10 e8 : crc=e8 YES
50 01 4b 46 7f ff 0c 10 e8 t=21000
50 01 4b 46 7f ff 0c 10 e8 : crc=e8 YES
50 01 4b 46 7f ff 0c 10 e8 t=21000
57 01 4b 46 7f ff 0c 10 38 : crc=38 YES
57 01 4b 46 7f ff 0c 10 38 t=21437
57 01 4b 46 7f ff 0c 10 38 : crc=38 YES
57 01 4b 46 7f ff 0c 10 38 t=21437

You may have noted that there is also a DHT22 sensor in the picture. Much like the 1-Wire overlay, the kernel driver for the DHT22 can be associated with an arbitrary GPIO pin like this:

dtoverlay=dht11,gpiopin=27