TEMPERATURE SENSING

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Sarah Hirschman
M.Arch. 2011

Ater my so-so result with the button/LED board last week, I decided to do the simplest possible set-up for this sensing input project, so that I could try to learn something at the end with Processing, which I wanted to try out.

SO - this is Neil's temperature sensor board from the class site - modified only for type!

So far so good here - the board milled well and came out clean. With a little scraping, the excess copper came out well.
This is the board before I found the 1microFerrod capacitor and the proper microcontroller. This is before weird things started to happen.

SO I read the label diagram incorrectly, and didn't realize that I had turned my microcontroller around in the wrong direction. When I plugged it into the FabISP to program it, I got "error number 1," and when I plugged it in directly to the computer via the serial cable, I immediately got a warning saying that one USB port was drawing too much power and would be shut down.

Andy took a look at it and compared his board to mine after I couldn't figure out where the short was... Turns out I had it flipped around the wrong way - hence the heat gun...

After heat-gunning off the microcontroller, the nearby resistor and capacity came off with it, so I reattached all those parts in their proper places, and lo and behold, it programmed correctly immediately!

With MUCH help from Davids Mellis and Carr, I figured out that in order to read serial data from this board straight to Processing, I needed to change Neil's temperature sensor sample code so that it was sending data out a bit slower.

THEN I got some sample code from the Processing library that was supposed to read serial data, and started playing with what ranges of data might do in terms of variation... I settled on a range of brr!, cold, cool, warm, hot and changing colors among those... see video!

The most difficult thing to find for Processing was how to specify multiple true statements... I found that "&&" means something like "and also".

Here is the Processing Code to do this.