Blog 1: Remote Temperature Transmitter and other experiments with thermistors - Introduction

Hello everyone! I'm one of the selected challengers for the 'Experimenting with Thermistors' challenge.

In the first blog, I will describe myself and the experiments I would conduct with the thermistors kit.

I have already received the thermistors kit, and it's time to start experimenting.

First, a little bit about myself- I'm an electronics engineer from India with an experience of about 7+ years. I love to work on analog circuits, RF, Embedded systems, and SDRs. I have a master's degree in RF and Antenna Design. I have published several papers related to RF and antennas.
You can check my website and my google scholar profile for more details if you're interested in my work. Currently, I'm working as an independent researcher.

Coming to the experiments that I would like to perform with the thermistors, I have planned out a few things as follows -

• Analog auto-cutoff circuit using thermistor
• ADC for thermistors
• Remote Temperature Transmitter
• I will disclose it at a later point

Analog auto-cutoff circuit using thermistor

This is an opamp comparator-based thermal protection circuit for the auto-cutoff of electrical devices.

This will be a simple circuit based on the opamp comparator as shown below.

The ref. voltage will be set using a potentiometer, and the voltage divider formed by the thermistor and resistor R will be used to compare against the ref. voltage. Any change in voltage at the voltage divider will trigger the output of the opamp and will drive the load through the relay.

ADC for thermistors

Here I will demonstrate an off-the-shelf IC MAX6682 from Maxim Integrated for thermistor interfacing with a microcontroller. More details will be given in the actual blog post when I will experiment on this.

Remote Temperature Transmitter

This is the main project which I included in the application for the contest. Here I will design a remote temperature transmitter that will monitor temperatures remotely. This will use an RF link to send the temperature from the thermistor to a remote location. I'm still working on the implementation of this, and I may implement an analog transmitter without any MCU.

The last project I would carry out with the thermistors is something interesting and unconventional that I thought about after submitting my application. I will disclose this at a later point.