Hello everyone. I welcome you to my next blog as part of Experimenting with Thermistors Design Challenge. In previous (1st) blog post I described my plans as part of this competition. In meantime I received my thermistors kit and started testing thermistors from the Kit. This blog post starts my 3-part serie named minitutorial showing basic usage of thermistor. In this first part I will show how does the thermistor work. In second part I will automate this process using Arduino and in third part I will show improvement of code for getting more precise temperature value. In this blog post (video) I will show how to use Molex thermistor, multimeter and datasheet to measure temperature of ambient temperature and temperature of hot water. Instead of writing lot of text and taking lot of photos I decided record this mini-experiment and provide it as a video:
This was my first mini-experiment for testing thermistors. As you can see, it works exactly as described in datasheet and after placing one of thermistor to the hot water it decreased its resistance exactly as expected. From table provided as part of datasheet I was able to convert resistance to temperature using simple lookup method. In next tutorial blog post I will describe how to measure resistance (which corresponds to temperature) using Arduino and then I will post some more theory focused blog post about formula for converting resistance to temperature.
In the meantime, I am finishing designing my PCB(s) which I will use as part of my main experiment as part of this contest and most probably I will send them to the fab sometime this week.
Thank you for reading this blog and stay tuned to the next one. I like to hear any feedback regarding my experiment, so feel free to comment it bellow.