Month: November 2011

Arduino and the DS18B20 temperature sensor

So, this is the reason I started with an Arduino in the first place. In summer 2010 I ordered an Arduino and a DS18B20 temperature sensor because I wanted to monitor the water temperature in my aquarium in the summer and have the Arduino start fans if needed. My flat is directly below the roof and gets quite hot.

But I never figured out how to read the temperature from the sensor, every tutorial I followed, every code snippet I found showed either nothing at all or ridiculously wrong temperatures. Nevertheless, I just decided to try it again, wired it up and the third code snippet I tried worked. Of course, it’s the sample code right on the Arduino Playground…

A DS18B20 temperature sensor wired up to an Arduino Duemilanove

Continue reading Arduino and the DS18B20 temperature sensor

Starting with the front plate

Today I was rummaging through a crafts store and found some dark card board and translucent paper. The paper is available in different colors, so I can customize the color of the words to my liking. I cut some rough letters out of the card board and placed the translucent paper behind it. Continue reading Starting with the front plate

LEDs arrived

Today the LEDs I ordered finally arrived. A couple of days ago I stumbled upon a wiring technique called “charlieplexing”, which is explained quite thorough in this article. If my calculations are correct I’m going to need 12 pins on the Arduino to control the LEDs and another one for the DCF module, so I’ll be good with the regular 14 pins.

So, next I’ll start wiring up some LEDs for testing. As long as I don’t have the DCF module some dummy clock function will have to to.