Temperature Sensor added to the Store

Well, it’s been a little over a month since the new website went live. That makes it time for a product update!

In December the Wind Sensor was added to the store. For the new Temp Sensor we worked with the guys at Liquidware. You can see the results below, an Arduino-attachable instant thermometer, plugging directly into Arduino Duemilanove Analog Pins 2-5.

You also don’t have to use it in the analog header is you don’t want to use up most of your analog inputs. It just turns out that the native Arduino I2C hardware is analog pins 4 & 5 – and the sensor requires so little power that the other analog pins can be used (in digital form) for power, enabling an easy application. However the sensor will work fine with the Arduino wire library on any pins you care to use. Or even with any other microController for which an I2C interface has been written – so basically everywhere.

The TMP421 chip is a 12 bit I2C chip that works from minus – 40 to 125 degrees C, so the sensor is able to resolve .04 degrees C per bit. The absolute accuracy is guaranteed to be +/- 1 degree C. The relative resolution should make the sensor useful for a range of high resolution activities such as sniffing out drafts around windows.

This board also has remote temperature sensing abilities and a ready-to-load Arduino library on the Liquidware App Store.

We’re still hard at work on a pile of other sensors, and lots of work is going on behind the scenes.

Another quick announcement: We added a search box on Modern Device, something I’ve always wanted! Give it a spin and send us know what you think, or send us other website feature requests at hello.moderndevice@gmail.com.

As always, happy programming,

Paul

Written by Paul Badger on February 10, 2010