Maybe you also have some of these strange components in your tinkering box, which you removed from a defective battery pack or an old PC power supply. These are NTC resistors, i.e. resistors with a negative temperature coefficient. Their resistance therefore decreases with increasing temperature. They are suitable for temperature measurement or, as the title of this project says, for building a thermostat.
If we connect an NTC resistor in series with another resistor whose value we know, we can measure the voltage at this voltage divider and calculate the unknown resistance value of the NTC from it. We can set up the voltage divider in two different ways, namely connect the NTC to ground or to Vcc.
---+-- Vcc ---+--- Vcc
| |
.-. .-.
| | Rs |\| NTC
'-' '-'
| |
+---> analog input +---> analog input
| |
.-. .-.
|\| NTC | | Rs
'-' '-'
| |
---+--- GND ---+--- GND
If we assume that the ADC (analog to digital converter) of our microcontroller
delivers the value Aval between 0 and Amax (e.g. 0..1023), for input voltages from
0V to Vcc , the resistance of the NTC for the two cases is calculated as follows:
Rt = Rs * Aval / (Amax - Aval Rt = Rs * (Amax - Aval) / Aval
or with or with
k = (Amax -Aval) / Aval k = (Amax -Aval) / Aval
= Amax/Aval - 1 = Amax/Aval - 1
we get we get
Rt = Rs * 1/k (NTC to GND) Rt = Rs * k (NTC to Vcc)
============= ===========
Now we know the resistance of the NTC. But how do we calculate the temperature from this?
The formula of Steinhart-Hart helps us here:
R(T) = Ro * exp(BETA * (1/T - 1/To) Steinhart–Hart equation =================================== To Nominal temperature, normally 25°C 🚩 for calculations use degrees Kelvin 🚩 Ro Resistance of the NTC resistor at nominal temperature R(To) Roo = Ro * exp(-BETA / To) Resistance for T --> oo Rt = Roo * exp(BETA / T) Resistance at temperature T T = BETA / ln(Rt / Roo) Temperature as a function of measured resistance ==========================In the Steinhart-Hart equation BETA denotes the characteristic parameter of the NTC. It can be taken from the data sheet of the NTC or calculated from 2 resistance measurements at different temperatures:
T2 * T1
BETA = ------- * ln(R1 / R2) R1, R2 measured resitance values at
T2 - T1 two different temperatures T1, T2
With the above knowledge we are now able to design two classes, one for the NTC sensor, the other for the thermostat. The sensor class must know to which pin the sensor is connected and how large BETA and the nominal resistance of the NTC are. Further it must be known whether the NTC is connected to Vcc or to GND and how large the maximum analog value of the ADC is. The constructor of NTCsensor then looks like this. The member variables are initialized, the constant Roo is calculated and the pin mode of the analog pin is set.
NTCsensor(uint8_t pinNTC, uint16_t beta, uint16_t Ro, uint16_t Rs, bool ntcToGround=false, uint16_t analogMax=1023) :
_pinNTC(pinNTC), _beta(beta), _Ro(Ro), _Rs(Rs), _ntcToGround(ntcToGround), _analogMax(analogMax)
{
pinMode(_pinNTC, INPUT);
_Roo = _Ro * exp(-(float)_beta / (_To - _Tabs)); // calculate the resistance of the NTC for T --> oo
}
Of course, we would like to be able to query the temperature in °C, °F and °K and also
output the parameters of the NTC. The corresponding methods are provided for this purpose.
A thermostat is really nothing more than a switch that triggers appropriate actions at certain temperatures. That is why we pass to the constructor of the NTCthermostat class only a reference to a sensor object and the references to two functions that are called when the lower or upper temperature limits are reached.
typedef void (*CallbackFunction)();
NTCthermostat(NTCsensor &ntc, CallbackFunction onLowTemp, CallbackFunction onHighTemp) :
_ntc(ntc), _onLowTemp(onLowTemp), _onHighTemp(onHighTemp) {}
The temperature is measured periodically in the loop() method. The measurement interval and the two temperature limits are set with corresponding methods. All other details can be seen in the code.
The main program, here an excerpt of it, is quite simple. An NTCsensor and an NTCthermostat object are created, the two callbacks are defined and then the loop method of the thermostat is called in the main loop.
// Forward declaration of the 2 callbacks to be supplied to the thermostats constructor
void onLowerLimit();
void onUpperLimit();
NTCsensor myNTC(PIN_NTC, BETA, Ro, Rs, NTC_TO_GROUND, ANALOG_MAX); // NTCsensor object
NTCthermostat myThermostat(myNTC, onLowerLimit, onUpperLimit); // NTCthermostat object
bool heatingIsOn = false;
/**
* To be performed when temperature drops below lower limit
*/
void onLowerLimit()
{
if (! heatingIsOn)
{
Serial.print(myThermostat.getCelsius());
Serial.println(" °C: switch heating on");
heatingIsOn = true;
}
}
/**
* To be performed when temperature rises above upper limit
*/
void onUpperLimit()
{
if (heatingIsOn)
{
Serial.print(myThermostat.getCelsius());
Serial.println(" °C: switch heating off");
heatingIsOn = false;
}
}
/**
* Print temperature every N milliseconds
*/
void printTemperature(uint32_t every_N_ms)
{
if (millis() % every_N_ms == 0)
{
myNTC.printSensorValues();
}
}
void setup()
{
Serial.begin(115200);
myThermostat.setLimits(25.0, 30.0); // sets lower and upper limit to switch a heating on or off
myThermostat.setInterval(1000); // sets the refresh interval of the temperature measurement
}
void loop()
{
myThermostat.loop(); // checks the temperature limits in the cycle of the set interval
printTemperature(10000); // print sensor readings every 10 seconds
}
Interested? Please download the entire program code. The zip-file contains the complete PlatformIO project.
My programming environment is not the native Arduino™ IDE but PlatformIO™ on top of Microsoft's Visual Studio Code™. This combination offers many advantages and allows a much better structuring of the code into several modules especially when we adopt The Object Oriented way.