ChipKIT Temperature Shield Supports A Dozen Sensors

chipkit_temp_board

[Will] wrote in to share a useful add-on he designed for the ChipKIT UNO 32, a 12-port temperature sensor board.

Constructed for one of his customers, the shield accepts any 2-wire 10k thermistor sensors, outputting the readings to a small LCD screen. The screen is supported by some code put together by his associate [crenn], but you are not limited to solely displaying the temperatures there. Since this module piggybacks on top of the ChipKIT the same fashion as any standard shield, you clearly have the ability to use and manipulate the data at will. With 12 ports on board this would work well for a house-wide temperature monitoring system, or perhaps in a complex brewing setup.

Both the temperature shield and LCD boards have been released under the Open Source Hardware License, so you can easily build your own if you have the means, though [Will] has a few extras he’s willing to sell if you need one quickly.

8 thoughts on “ChipKIT Temperature Shield Supports A Dozen Sensors

  1. How hard would this be to use for, say, multi-point monitoring of a barrel wood smoker?

    Coupled with some exhaust fans this could be a killer accessory for maintaining heat zones… hmm

  2. Don’t thermistors usually require at least the B value to be reasonable accurate ? And B is not quite the same for every thermistor. Maybe I’ve missed something in his code though…

    1. I also believe the resistors are a tricky part since they have to be stable and precise, yet I do believe I don’t see the high precision kind in that picture.
      And in fact I would have thought they’d pick SMD resistors.

      But hey if it works well enough it works well enough and there’s no need to be anal about it I guess.

  3. I have one of these sets on my bench right now. They are quite accurate, with in a degree of what my Harbor Freight non contact IR thermometer reads on the surface of a cold beer can. Will did an excellent job on the hardware and Crenn’s code is clean, lean, and efficient as always! Congrats on the HAD feature guys!

  4. I use resistors for thermistors all the time…you need to get about 3x more 1% resistors than you actually need, and about 4x more 2% thermistors than you actually need, then use a multimeter to pick the closest ones. Then you write your code for the specific values, and you have sub-degree accuracy. The extra parts don’t go to waste; they just go to the next project.

    BTW…a Teensy 2.0 and a project board make for great thermal monitoring of up to 12 points, and there are enough pins left for a display and numerous secondary functions.

Leave a Reply to svofskiCancel reply

Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.