In a programmer’s mind

A digital thermometer

I have always liked electronics. I remember receiving different mechanical toy kits when I was a kid. I would make a car, a tank, a boat and all kind of different motorized projects. I would play for hours at a time with this kit. It was great but there was only an on/off switch.

During my teen years, I have been teaching robotics for children at our primary school with some lego mechanical kit. It was great because you could plug in sensors, motors and create a program that would check if a specific sensor was above a value and respond to it. My college final project was a full blown calculator. It was more like a full adder with three seven-segment display, but I like to think of it as a full calculator.

Since a few days ago, I have not touched electronics. I changed my mind after looking at the Arduino proposal. Arduino is a programmable and open source electronic board which includes a few input and output channels. It is low cost and easy to get started with. I bought an experimentation kit with an Arduino and a few of the base stuff you will want to play with in electronics: resistances, diodes, leds, transistors, sensors, motors, etc. It came with a few projects which I quickly completed.

I was wondering what I could do next and I came up with the digital thermometer project. Since my commercial digital thermometer is currently broken and my girlfriend likes to know what is the temperature in our house, I built a new one. You can see an picture of it in this post.

My initial kit did not include a display so I had to buy one. Also, the display had to be solder on pin headers so I bought a soldering iron. I never soldered before. I read the guide that came with my soldering iron, I tried a few times on a cardboard than set to complete my display. I was actually easier than I though. I managed to complete the soldering part with minor messes. The coding part was actually quite easy. There is a library to use the display with where you only need to pass the text to display. The remaining part was to read from the temperature sensor, compute the temperature from the voltage, plug in the wires and plug the power in.

If you like electronics and you are a total beginner in that field, Arduino is a nice platform to get started with. Have fun!