Temperature is one of parameters that affect our lives directly. It is important to know ambient temperature of working place, of an object or simply track its pattern during some time. For this temperature loggers work best. Loggers can be different in their design especially how they store data. If you really want to have stand alone you might go with local storage media and battery power source.

But sometimes you just need simple and fast solution to track your room temperature. Why build complex circuit for this. Embedded-lab suggests using an USB-UART converter that you probably already have and attach small PIC12F1822 board that only interfaces MCP9701 temperature sensor. It doesn’t need power supply circuit as chip draws it from USB converter board. Main advantage of this solution is that microcontroller has only to read sensor data and transfer it to USART where it goes to PC. Whole magic happens in PC software where you aren’t so limited with resources like storage space or visualization capabilities. With Processing you can draw nice graphical representations of temperature and have GUI based control of device.

[Pick and place] shared some ideas about his current project he’s bee working on. Its a small portable temperature logger with some handy features. The aim of logger is to be USB key shaped battery operated device that can store at least 30K of temperature samples with time stamp.

So main chip is chosen with internal USB capability and internal RTC – PIC 18F26J50. 8Mbit flash AT25DF081 is selected to store data and TI’s TMP102AIDRLT is selected to measure temperature. The idea is to store two files in flash memory one with actual data and second with configuration data where user will be able to set period of temperature acquisition. Project is still under development so don’t hesitate to share some thoughts what final design should look like.

Say you want to measure temperature anywhere. How to read data remotely? Probably obvious way is to use GPRS/GSM network to do that. GSM network covers most of land territory so most likely GSM based systems will work in your selected area.

Andrian wanted to build autonomous weather tracking system that could be placed anywhere and data would be delivered to a Web server. Weather station consists of PIC 16F877A microcontroller that drives SIM900/300 GSM module. GSM module is controlled via USART interface using AT commands. Basically it is used to send sensor data using GET method which isn’t the safest way but it’s working fine. Controller is also equipped with 16×2 LCD screen to display status information locally.

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