Read the Temperature With Arduino Uno

Introduction

In my first article on the Arduino Uno, we will focus on the use of an analog temperature sensor combined with a Liquid Crystal Display (LCD). The goal is to be able to track and code something. The finished display shows the temperature in degrees Celsius where the sensor is used with Arduino Uno.

To do it we need the following components:

I remember that all the components listed above are included in the Starter Kit, available at any electronics retail center, also available in the numerous sites selling online. Description of all components We will use the Arduino Uno to perform the management of the temperature sensor and the display. This is the basic model features in hardware to a microcontroller Atmega 328 16 MHz, 32 KB flash memory, a memory of SRAM 2K bytes. It is an analog temperature sensor that supplies a voltage value of 10mV for degrees directly proportional to the temperature value that is detected. It has a reading range that goes from -40 ° c to 125 ° c. Two-line display with 16 characters, backlight. The operation requires an electric voltage of 5v DC and a series of links that we will see in the article. This is the basis of where we're going to run the wiring of the electric circuit of all the components necessary to implement our example. It is necessary to protect the pin 15 of the display backlight, exactly pin LED +. The jumpers are pre-wired, with which we will put in communication all the components that will be the basis, so as to be able to perform all the electrical connections. The Potentiometer for adjusting the resistance, required for adjusting the contrast on the display. Electronic scheme and preview the circuit.

We now have everything related to the hardware, we just need to start our work of electrical wiring. First, we need to get the wiring diagram. If you also want to devote to the design of the circuit, there are free and paid software that allows the creation of a scheme electrical/electronic, because without it we can't expect to get down to business for the linking phase. One good free software I found is at this link. I leave the outline of connection with the software indicated in the previous link. For completeness, I also leave the pin for the easy connection of the display. Create Sketch code After creating the schema and making the connections of all the components it is time to move from the hardware to the software. The Arduino board to be properly programmed, has a basic IDE development tool that you can find at this link. Currently, the version is 1.6.4 and it was also released by Visual Micro. It is a plug-in for Visual Studio, with which we can easily program any form of the family of Arduino directly from Visual Studio. However, there are constraints on it or are not supported by, versions Express and installed from version 2008 to 2013, not yet available for the current version in 2015. My advice is to download the community version of Visual Studio 2013, the equivalent of a Professional version so be sure to install it. More information about Visual Micro can be found in the link left previously. For programming the sketch of the code, we will use in this article the Arduino IDE. Once installed, double-click on the screen and this and that we will find initially. We see that they have two methods, the first called setup() and the second loop(). He said briefly, in the setup() method, we need to provide everything about the initialization required for the operation of the project since it is done only once. All of the remaining code goes in the method loop(), that is executed repeatedly. Another thing is to define the variables globally, in other words, make them visible everywhere and we must declare them to the outside of both methods. First, click with the mouse on the "File", after "Salva con nome", call the project "Temperature Test". After doing that, we paste in the following C++ code.