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    Blogs    Jason Sachs   About Jason Sachs

Thermistor signal conditioning: Dos

Jason has 23 years of
experience in signal
conditioning (both ana

and Don'ts, Tips and Tricks digital) in motion contr

medical applications. H
Jason Sachs ● June 15, 2011 ● 16 comments 7 Tweet
 Tutorials making things spin.


In an earlier blog entry,  I mentioned this circuit for thermistor signal
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Add Last Night)
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It is worth a little more explanation on thermistor signal conditioning; it's Mistakes: Part I
Ten Little Algorithms, Pa
something that's often done poorly, whereas it's among the easiest The Single-Pole Low-Pas
applications for signal conditioning. Filter

The basic premise here is that there are two resistors in a voltage divider: Blogs - Hall of Fame
Rth is the thermistor, and Rref is a reference resistor. Here Rref is either R3
alone, or R3 || R4, depending on the gain setting. 10 CIRCUIT
COMPONENTS
SHOULD KNOW
This is only one possible circuit. There are many others, but please use the Jason Sachs
following guidelines.
THERMISTOR
Just to be clear, we're going to talk about using an NTC (negative-
SIGNAL
temperature coe cient) thermistor in an embedded system with an CONTIONING:
analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and a processor. AND DON'TS,
AND TRICKS
Jason Sachs
DON'T:
TUTORIAL: BY
Don't linearize your analog circuitry AND SWITH
Jason Sachs

Linearization is the use of additional circuitry (usually 1-3 additional xed

Free PDF Downloads
resistors placed in series or parallel with the thermistor or reference
resistor) to produce a voltage that is a more linear function of temperature.  Electronic Circuit
and Component Sele
There are a number of application notes on linearization from
manufacturers like Maxim, Microchip, and EPCOS.
 Practical Electron
In purely analog circuits, linearization is necessary. For example, Inventors

thermocouple circuits often require cold-junction compensation to correct

for errors caused by changing temperature of the "cold junction", which is  Diodes and Transi
where the thermocouple wires are attached to the signal conditioning
circuitry. This often uses a thermistor, and the nonlinear response of a
thermistor needs to be conditioned into a linear adjustment to the
thermocouple ampli er. All FREE PDF Downloa

In an embedded system using ADCs and a processor, linearization is both

unnecessary and wasteful. Linearization comes at a cost. The sensitivity
of voltage output is reduced, and there are more components involved,
which means more opportunities for component tolerance to contribute to
temperature error.

There is absolutely no reason why in such an embedded system, the

processor should not do the linearization in software. There are some very
simple and fast ways to handle the nonlinear conversion of ADC counts to
temperature, which we'll discuss later.

Don't use excess signal conditioning

One system I worked on was designed by a contractor, and had a

linearization circuit which reduced the sensitivity of the thermistor output
by about a factor of 10, followed by an ampli er circuit that ampli ed the
thermistor output by a factor of 10 relative to a reference voltage. I looked
at the schematic and shook my head.

Please realize that each stage of signal conditioning introduces the

chance for errors.

In analog circuitry, component tolerances and noise sensitivity cause

these errors: Resistors and capacitors have value tolerances. Op-amps
have specs like offset voltage and current. ADCs have gain and offset
errors, and integral and differential nonlinearity. (INL and DNL)

These all add up. My rule of thumb is that unless you keep things very
simple, use good components, and design carefully, it is di cult to have
net voltage errors below 1% of the ADC fullscale -- excluding the sensor
itself, and this goes for any sensor, not just thermistors.  If errors concern
you, then you really need to anticipate what kind of errors to expect in your
system, and nd ways to deal with them.

For a basic resistor divider, you can use 0.1% resistors: these have really
come down in price over the last 10 years -- a single 10K 0.1% 0603
resistor can be purchased from Digikey for 0.25, withpricesof about
0.10 in 1K quantities. As far as op-amps go, so many manufacturers make
CMOS op-amps with picoamp input currents that it's easy to forget about
input current errors. Typical offset voltages are now in the 2-5mV range.
For a buffering application in a 3.3V system this is about 0.1-0.2% of
fullscale; applications with gains higher than 1 are worse and you may
have to use more costly precision op-amps.

(In digital signal processing, there are no component tolerances or noise,

but in each stage of computation there is an oppportunity to introduce
errors when doing multiplication or division. PCs use double-precision (64
bits or more) to calculate math; embedded systems often limit this
precision to 32-bit or 16-bit xed point math. The errors are very small and
predictable compared to the errors of analog signal conditioning, but they
still exist.)

In any case, keep it simple and you'll save yourself trouble.

DO:
Do understand your requirements

This is probably the most important and understated part of the design
process, for any circuit, not just thermistors.

The three most important requirements for thermistor temperature

sensing are:

temperature sensing range

temperature sensing resolution
temperature sensing accuracy

Let's look at the "Z" curve for Quality Thermistors, in a voltage divider:

You'll typically nd NTC thermistors in a 10K nominal resistance at 25 C.

This nominal resistance at 25 C is an important parameter of the
thermistor, which we'll abbreviate as R25. Shown above are the output
voltages in a voltage divider (as a fraction of the total voltage across the
voltage divider) where the reference resistor Rref is either 0.2R25, 1.0R25, or
5.0R25. (corresponding to 2K, 10K, and 50K for R25=10K) These curves are
very easy to calculate from the manufacturer's thermistor curves: the
voltage divider ratio α = Rth/(Rref + Rth) = 1 - Rref/(Rref+Rth).

You'll notice that for each reference resistor, there's a range of about 60-80
degrees C over which α drops from 0.9 to 0.1. Outside those ranges, the
sensed voltage changes very little with temperature. So if your range of
interest is, for example, 25 C - 100 C, you might want to use Rref of 0.2R25
and live with the low resolution in sensed temperature above and below
that range. If you need to sense temperature over a wide range, you need
to make a system that either can accurately read voltage to deal with the
low sensitivity at cold and hot temperatures, or you need to switch Rref
between ranges, like we talked about in my previous article (with the
choice of either R3 alone, or R3 || R4).

Another way of looking at this circuit is to analyze the sensitivity itself (for
those of you familiar with calculus, it's the rst derivative with respect to
temperature dα/dT):

If you are using an 8-bit ADC, this graph shows the sensitivity (in counts
per degree) of temperature sensing at various temperatures. Sensitivity
and resolution are related: the more sensitive a circuit is, the higher
resolution it provides. Quantitatively, the two are related inversely: 3 counts
per degree means 0.33 degree resolution, whereas 10 counts per degree
means 0.1 degree resolution. If you only need 1 degree C resolution, you're
probably ne with an 8-bit ADC. If you need 0.1 degree C resolution, you'll
want a 10-bit ADC, or you'll want a way to amplify ranges of the thermistor
voltage.

Resolution is a distinct requirement from accuracy. A digital thermometer,

even if it's off by 2 degrees C, can easily show you temperature in 0.1
degree steps: that's a resolution of 0.1 degree but an accuracy of 2
degrees C.

Accuracy is much more di cult to analyze, as it has many contributing

factors, but the biggest cause is the accuracy of the thermistor itself.
Many thermistors are speci ed with a 5% resistance tolerance at 25 C; the
inherent temperature error is this relative accuracy divided by the
thermistor's temperature coe cient. Quality Z's thermistor table shows a
tempco of 4.4%/degree at 25 C, so 5% / 4.4% = 1.1 degree C accuracy.

In general, it is very di cult or expensive to get high accuracy thermistors

without some sort of calibration step.

 Do use ratiometric circuits

A ratiometric circuit is one in which the ratio of voltages or currents is

sensed, rather than their absolute values. Resistor dividers and
Wheatstone bridges are both examples of ratiometric circuits. Sensors
which use ratiometric circuits are ideal, because it means that the
accuracy of the quantity you are sensing is independent -- or at least nearly
independent -- of the accuracy of voltage or current references in your
circuit. If a reference voltage or current has variation with time or
temperature, so does the sensed voltage or current, and this variation
cancels out when the ratio is calculated.

Nearly all ADCs and DACs are ratiometric as well: the sampled digital
output of an ADC is the ratio of its analog input voltage to its reference
voltage, and the analog output of a DAC is the fraction of its reference
voltage selected by its digital input.

Three of the circuits I have mentioned (resistor dividers as a function of

their resistances, ADCs, and DACs) are what I would call strongly
ratiometric: the ratios of these circuits are unitless functions of resistance
or voltage ratios, and they range from essentially 0 to essentially 1. In
other words, the gain is almost exactly predictable. (ADCs and DACs have
slight gain error, and resistor dividers of low values may have parasitic
series resistance that causes errors, but otherwise their transfer functions
are very close to 1.)

Watch out with your ADCs and DACs, though: some of them take in half-
scale reference voltages, so there is an indirect gain of 2 somewhere in the
circuit, caused by resistor or capacitor or transistor area matching, and the
ICs that do this sometimes don't specify very well the tolerance of this
gain. Some examples of this are the ADCs in TI's 28xxx DSP family, and the
MAX5322 DAC.

Most sensors are ratiometric but not strongly ratiometric: for a xed
sensing quantity (temperature, strain, humidity, etc.) their output is
ratiometric to a supply voltage or reference voltage, but the sensor gain is
not unitless, and has part-to-part variation. For strain gages, as an
example, there is a gain from strain to resistance that depends on the
manufacturing tolerances and material properties of the strain gage. So
the gain of a strain gage will not be affected by changes in supply voltage,
but it will vary from part to part. Often the gain will need to be calibrated
out.
In any case, the #1 thing you should remember when you have a sensor
that is ratiometric, used with an ADC that is ratiometric, is to use the same
reference voltage! (Or reference voltages with very tightly coupled ratios.)
Otherwise you are throwing away free accuracy. As an example, if you have
a precision 3V reference driving a voltage divider, but you use an
inaccurate 3.3V analog power supply on an ADC, as the power supply
varies you will see different readings from the ADC.

Do treat your ADC input channels properly

Don't just hook up a resistor divider to an ADC input channel without

analyzing what is going on. I may write a future article going into more
detail, but brie y speaking, there are two important characteristics of ADC
input channels that you need to be aware of: input leakage, and input
capacitance.

Input leakage is a parasitic resistance or current ow between the ADC

input and one or more other circuit nodes within the ADC. It's the same
idea as input current offset in an op-amp. The resulting current, times your
circuit's equivalent resistance, produces an undesired offset error. You
may have to buffer the voltage into your ADC to minimize this error.

Input capacitance is a much more subtle issue. Many ADCs use an internal
sample-and-hold capacitor: the ADC hooks this capacitor up to your input
voltage using internal switches, then disconnects the capacitor from the
input and uses a state machine and comparators and what-not to convert
that capacitor voltage to a digital reading. (If you're curious, look up
successive-approximation converters in Wikipedia.)

So the input stage of an ADC looks like a capacitor that appears and
disappears, and in a multiple-channel ADC this capacitor transfers charge
between inputs. This happens every time you sample the input voltage
before a conversion, and your external circuit needs to transfer charge
to/from the sampling capacitor until the voltage stabilizes.

The best solution is to put a unity-gain buffer (which solves the input
leakage and part of the input capacitance issue) followed by a small RC
low-pass lter, in front of the ADC input. This lter provides a stiff source
of charge (via the external capacitor) to the ADC sample-and-hold
capacitor, and the resistor isolates the op-amp from a capacitive load.
Usually this RC is in the 100-1000ohm and 100-1000pf range, so its time
constant is under 1us.

Do understand the thermal properties of thermistors

Thermistors aren't perfect. They have two characteristics -- self-heating

and conduction through leads -- that can ruin your day if you're not careful.

A thermistor, like any other resistor, dissipates power = I2R. Power

dissipation causes the thermistor to heat up to a temperature that is
slightly higher than the one you want to sense: in other words, this causes
sensor error. Most thermistor datasheets will give you a self-heating
thermal coe cient, like 2mW/C, which means that for every 2mW you
dissipate in the thermistor, its temperature will be off by 1 degree C. This is
measured in still air; in moving air or a liquid the self-heating is smaller,
because the power dissipation is conducted or convected away more
easily. So the good news is the self-heating constant in the datasheet is a
maximum amount of self-heating (well, unless you surround it by
insulation). The bad news is that the actual change in temperature due to
self-heating depends on air ow and is therefore usually unpredictable,
which means you can't reliably write an algorithm to compensate for self-
heating error.

On the other hand, even though self-heating temperature rise is

unpredictable, it is easy to calculate how much self-heating power can
occur in a voltage divider. The worst-case amount of self-heating is when
the thermistor and reference resistor are equal values, at which point the
power dissipation in each is Vref2/Rref/4. At lower temperatures, when the
thermistor's resistance increases, the current through the pair of resistors
drops. At higher temperatures, when the thermistor's resistance
decreases, current increases but most of the power dissipation is across
the reference resistor.

There are two things you can do to reduce self-heating: One is to use a
higher-valued thermistor, e.g. 100K rather than 10K nominal -- I'm not sure
why 10K is the standard value, but it's a poor choice in many applications.
The other is to use a smaller reference voltage. This makes the voltage
sensitivity of your circuit smaller, but it may lower the total error if the self-
heating can be greatly reduced.

The other important thermal issue to note, besides self-heating, is the

thermal conduction through the thermistor's leads. There has to be an
electrical connection between a thermistor's sensing element and your
circuit. Circuit boards and components use copper. Copper is a great
electrical conductor, and it's also a great conductor of heat. So there's also
an unwanted thermal connection between a thermistor's sensing element
and your circuit. For example, if you're measuring hot air at 80 C slowly
moving through a pipe with a thermistor that has its leads soldered to a
circuit board on a 30 C heat sink, the thermal conductivity between the
thermistor and the air might be 50 times better than the thermal
conductivity between the thermistor and the circuit board, but 50 isn't
in nity, so the thermistor would read 49/50 * 80 + 1/50 * 30 = 79 C:  so
you'll see inaccuracies caused by relative variation between the two
temperatures.

This is one reason why thermistor leads and copper traces may need to be
very thin, so that they minimize parasitic thermal conduction through the
thermistor leads.
TIPS AND TRICKS
There's two other tips and tricks I'll share with you. One is on the analog
side, and the other is on the digital side.

Tip: ADC gain/offset autocalibration

ADCs have gain and offset error. You're stuck with it, and it's usually
speci ed in LSBs (multiples of 1 ADC count). For example, Microchip's
MCP3201 (a 12-bit ADC) is spec'd at +/- 3LSB (=0.07% of fullscale) offset
and +/-5LSB (=0.12% of fullscale) gain error.

Let's use a 4:1 analog multiplexer to measure 4 different things into the
ADC channel:

Two voltage dividers (from two thermistors)

A 3-resistor voltage divider with taps that are close to the upper and
lower rails.

This lets us measure two voltage divider ratios, and two reference ratios.
The reference ratios are so close to 0 and 1 that they are very insensitive
to resistor tolerance. A 1:100:1 voltage divider that uses 1% tolerance
resistors has ratios of approx 0.0098 and 0.9902, with worst-case ranges
of 0.0096-0.0100 and 0.9900-0.9904. That's +/- 0.02% of fullscale
accuracy out of 1% resistors! These inaccuracies are smaller than the
errors caused by the gain and offset error of the MCP3201, so we can
measure its inputs at 1% of fullscale (nominally 41 counts) and 99% of
fullscale (nominally 4055 counts) and use the readings to compensate for
gain and offset error. (We're still stuck with differential and integral
nonlinearity) A high-ratio voltage divider also allows for a very low output
impedance with low power dissipation (100 ohm output impedance but
10.2K fullscale resistance in the above circuit)

Tip: Convert directly from resistor ratio to temperature

Once you've measured the ADC reading of a thermistor voltage divider, and
compensated for ADC gain and offset, there are a number of ways you can
convert that ADC reading to a temperature. (Remember, the relationship
between voltage divider output and NTC thermistor temperature is a
nonlinear operation.) Two ways not to do this are:

lookup tables
ADC reading -> resistance -> temperature

Lookup tables are simple. They're arrays of numbers that convert an index
to an output. But they're also space hogs for the amount of accuracy you
get out of them. With a 12-bit ADC, you're either going to need a 4096-
element lookup table, or you're going to have to interpolate between
elements of a smaller lookup table, in which case you need to do some
multiplication. By the time you commit to using multiplication, you're
generally better off just using a polynomial. So unless you have a lot of
extra RAM or ROM (or an 8-bit ADC which only needs a 256-element
lookup table) and are using a processor where hardware multiplication
isn't available (no "multiply" assembly instruction), a lookup table is a poor
choice for converting ADC voltage to temperature.

The other important thing to note is that while you can convert between
ADC reading and thermistor resistance, and then from thermistor
resistance to temperature, in almost all cases this two-step process is
unnecessary and a poor choice. You don't really care what the thermistor's
resistance is! You care what temperature it is. And on top of that, if you try
to compute the thermistor's resistance, it varies over several orders of
magnitude: it's a nearly exponential relationship with temperature, and
exponentials are bad things to have to calculate with xed-point math.
(thought experiment: a Quality Z 10K thermistor at 25C will be 32.6K at 0
C, and 679 ohms at 100C. If you want 1% numerical accuracy, that means
a dynamic range of 32.6K / (1% of 679 ohms) = 4800:1, which is possible
in 16-bit math but doesn't leave much room in case you suddenly nd out
you need to sense temperature from -10 C or -20 C)

There's a general lesson here: whenever you have your choice of

computations, pick the one that is the most linear possible.

What does this mean? That's another story for a future article, but brie y:

From a qualitative standpoint, take a function you have to calculate and

graph it. If it looks kind of like a line, or a line with a little bit of curvature
you're in good shape. If it has sharp corners or cusps or quickly turns from
steep to shallow, it's going to be di cult to calculate accurately.

From a quantitative standpoint, prefer the lowest-order polynomial that

approximates a computation.

In this case, if I did need to know the thermistor's resistance, I would

probably express it in logarithmic terms, e.g. calculate log Rth rather than
Rth itself. This is because the relationship between temperature and log Rth
is closer to a quadratic or cubic polynomial, whereas between temperature
and Rth is exponential.
It turns out that in most cases the relationship between voltage divider
ratio α and temperature is not that nonlinear. Depending on the
temperature range you care about, you may be able to get away with a 3rd-
order polynomial or even a quadratic.

The approach for doing this approximation is fairly simple:

1. Compute the nominal ADC voltage for a given temperature.

(Alternatively: calibrate your system by measuring ADC voltage at
various temperatures.)
2. Use your favorite math software
(MATLAB/Octave/SciLab/Mathematica/MathCAD/etc., or if you really
must, use Excel) to t a polynomial to the curve x = ADC voltage, y =
temperature.
3. Calculate the error between the actual temperature and the predicted
temperature based on the polynomial.
4. If the error is lower than your requirements, you're done; otherwise, you
may need to either increase the degree of the polynomial or split the
range into pieces. As a rule of thumb, polynomials of degrees higher
than 5 should be avoided; the higher the polynomial degree, the more
di cult it is to avoid over ow and under ow errors.

Whew!

At this point, you may be wondering, how did such a simple problem get so
complicated?

Such is engineering! If it were easy, it wouldn't be interesting.

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Comments

Comments  Write a Comment  Select to add a comment

[-] Comment by webmasterpdx ● June 17, 2012

 I am using a simple thermister with a resistor to form a
divider and this is fed directly to my ADC (LPC ARM from NXP).
I don't need any signal conditioning. I just use a look up
4 table to catch the non-linearity of the sensor and convert to
the right temperature value. It works fine....has been tested
from -30 to +70....gets a little inaccurate at the extremes,
but thats good enough for my application. Is dead on everywhere
else. Doesn't need any signal conditioning? Is your application
special or something that it requires conditioning? Thanks -
Donald

Reply  Reply 

[-] Comment by Bob58 ● December 8, 2013

From Thermistor, Thermocouple and an IC temperature sensor.
What would be the criteria for selection of the device and
which one will suite the process information below:
1
Process temperature range 25°C - 90°C
Required output voltage range 0V 10V, with 25°C
corresponding to 0V and 90°C corresponding to 10V
Desired non-linearity should be less than 1%
Resolution 0.5%
Ambient temperature range 0°C - 25°C

Thanks, Bob

Reply  Reply 

[-] Comment by kevbo ● April 21, 2017

 Nice, very informative article.

On polynomial approximations: In general I never like to go

1 beyond 2nd or 3rd order either, and not just due to CPU
cycles...I'll explain why in a bit. For the thermistors,
third order makes a lot of sense if first order (just a line)
doesn't cut it....the curve is S shaped. If it were C shaped,
a second order would be my preference.

Besides computational complexity, the reason I like to avoid

higher order polynomial approximations is that sooner or later
I, or the next programmer might need a bit more range that what
was originally intended. High order polynomials tend to
quickly blow up just beyond the range they were optimized for.
You see this most often when someone extrapolates from a curve
fitted to empirical data.

Both the first and third order approximations will at least

trend in the correct direction after you leave the mid-range
area where they would be optimized. One end of the quadratic
is going to head off in the opposite direction. In a control
loop, that could well result in instability due to reversal of
a feedback term.

Even when our processor has multiply instructions, cubing can

result in overflow that needs to be dealt with. One work
around is to use logarithms (hey, you, come back here...and
stop that screaming!) It turns out that computing base 2 logs
of binary integers is not very hard...bit shift to find the
characteristic (position of leftmost 1) , and use a 16 or 32
entry lookup table to find the log of the most significant 4 or
5 bits of the mantissa.

Once you have gone through the pain of learning to do it this

way, any power or root, even fractional roots become pretty
trivial to compute to decent approximation.

In one of their COP400 uC application notes National

Semiconductor (Remember them?) had some insight on finding
base 2 logs efficiently. The COP400 assembly code is useless
of course, but the algorithms are well explained:

http://www.ti.com/lit/an/snoa633/snoa633.pdf

Reply  Reply 

[-] Comment by jms_nh ● April 21, 2017

Thanks for the detailed feedback and for the pointers to the
base2 log appnote.

0 In general I prefer to use Cheybyshev approximation and stick

with polynomials (and you are absolutely right, the choice of
range is really important), but I'll have to give it a look.

Reply  Reply 

[-] Comment by Roho ● October 9, 2012

Thanks for the article Jason. You made good points about
designing a temperature measurement system.

0

Reply  Reply 
[-] Comment by Anish19 ● January 18, 2014
Hi, nice article
the hyperlink you've given to the first line, is linked to the
address which doesn't contain the article. http://electronics-
0 related.com/showarticle/81.php
Instead, it must be linked to
http://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/81.php

Reply  Reply 

[-] Comment by jms_nh ● June 8, 2014

fixed, thanks!

0

Reply  Reply 

[-] Comment by saif37 ● February 22, 2016

Im in the process of designing my signal conditioning for
thermistor.
Is it my circuit design is reasonable as I use Wheatstone
0 bridge, instrumentation amplifier and low pass filter ?
and in order to linearize it, I use parallel resistor.

Reply  Reply 

[-] Comment by jms_nh ● February 22, 2016

Wheatstone bridges and instrumentation amplifiers are used
for measuring very small resistance changes in things like
strain gauges. You won't need a Wheatstone bridge and
0 instrumentation amp for thermistors; they have a very large
voltage change so the gain of instrumentation amplifier is
unnecessary. Ditto for the linearization resistor if you are
feeding the results into an ADC. (you can linearize
digitally) If you want an analog voltage output then
linearization is a necessary evil.

Reply  Reply 

[-] Comment by how2when ● March 20, 2016

I have an end boss that has a single four lead electrical
socket to handle a thermistor and a 24VDC solenoid valve. Can I
use the same 4 lead wire to handle all the connections, or
0 would I be better off separating them into two separate wires
to avoid noise transfer?

Reply  Reply 

[-] Comment by jms_nh ● May 11, 2016

well, you'll have some capacitive coupling between the
solenoid wires and the thermistor. But I wouldn't expect a
lot, and you can add both analog and digital filters because
0 temperatures change slowly. I'd try it out with them all
together. Thermocouples are much more sensitive because the
signal is very small.
 Reply  Reply 

[-] Comment by littleboot ● October 13, 2016

Great article! thanks for sharing.

0

Reply  Reply 

[-] Comment by twilson1234 ● January 12, 2017

Thank you for your informative article. I appreciate the time

you put into this. Would you please provide the da/dT plot
formulas?
0

Reply  Reply 

[-] Comment by jms_nh ● January 14, 2017

I'm not sure I have them anymore; this was an early article
and I didn't keep everything carefully in version control the
way I do now.
0
Anyway, they aren't explicit formulas; the way I derived them
was to fit a curve to the Quality Thermistor Z data, then
consider the voltage divider function α = R /(R + R )
ref ref th

and differentiate it with respect to T:

+ R ) × dR /dt.
2
dα/dT = −R ref
/(R ref th th

Hope this helps.

Reply  Reply 

[-] Comment by ScottH ● March 15, 2019

Jason -

Mad respect. Great article, thanks for sharing. I appreciate

0 your focuses on tolerances.

I am working on a project and reading your article brought up

several questions you may be willing to help with? 8 years
after you posted lol.

An Arduino ATmega328P 8 bit CPU that I have coded a PID

algorithm to control a radiator fan in a car depending on
coolant temperature and also AC condenser split temp. It puts
out a PWM signal to an OEM fan that has it's own hardware and
logic, the only thing I have to do is send to the fan a 100hz
at prescribed duty cycles. It works great on the bench, I'm
ready for install and want to ensure a stable design in the
working environment (potential for electrical noise).

4 thermistors: 10k thermistors 25°c ref for 1) ambient, 2)

condenser output, and two delphi OEM thermistors for 3)
radiator inlet, 4) radiator outlet.

QUESTIONS (see below for current circuit and details that may
help with answers):
 help with answers):

- What would you add to the circuit for filtering or

protection?
- Would shielded cable or twisted wires help or be necessary?
24g wires okay?
- 0.10% resistors necessary?
- Why pullup vs pulldown for reference resistor? Should I
change?
- Should I have a delay between my 5 data samples for a
reading?

WORKING ON THE BENCH:

See bottom for pic of full circuit. I have not calibrated for
absolute accuracy, but it reads as expected and the resolution
sweeps great at 0.1°.

DETAILS:

- For the 10k thermistors, I use steinhart equation with spec

constants, resolution coded to 0.1°c.
- For the Delphi sensors, the spec sheet only has a lookup
table, so I fit steinhart best I could and is within 0.1°c
through the working range.
- Time constant of fanChange->tempChange creates a PID
cycle that requires temperature readings about every 5 seconds,
but my display refreshes at 2Hz so that is when I get readings.
- Resolution is more important to me than absolute (but I'd
like to be within 1c absolute). I just want to make sure
transitions are smooth without jitter for each PID cycle at
0.1°c readings.
- Critical working temp ranges have thermistor resistance range
from 1,250 ohm->130 ohm and total non-critical range starting
at 50k ohm.
- Code reads the resistance using 10k pullups and converts to
0-1023.
- Code averages 5 immediate looped readings to get a value.
- I have started wiring with 24g leads from Arduino under dash
to thermistors under hood, about 6 foot run and potentially
passing some noisy stuff but I'm isolating best I can.

THANK YOU for any help. I'm a hobbyist so any detail you can
provide with your suggestion would be helpful so I don't screw
up your good advice! Any help received will certainly be passed
on as anyone might ask me for help.

- Scott

Reply  Reply 

[-] Comment by stephaneb ● March 17, 2019

You should try posting your question in the forum.

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