Why are you doing this?
Because it seemed fun. I dont anticipate that I’ll see any energy savings from this, but the data is way cool and if I don’t have a project to work on, I become a waste of space.
How much did it all cost?
The Arduino was like $30 I think, the sensors were free, the CAT-5e was $25 and all of the other stuff like the connectors and the protoboard came in under $20. So about $75.
Why an Arduino/DS18S20P?
Because it’s what I had and because Maxim is really great about samples and gave me the DS18S20P sensors for free.
Why the PC? Why not store the data on the uC and query it later?
I only have 512 Bytes of EEPROM and 1K of RAM and the strings I return are 27 Bytes long per sensor. That means I could store right about 19 sensor values or a little over 2 minutes worth in EEPROM. While I could double that using RAM, it’s still a pretty small amount of data. The data is meant to be interpreted and acted on real time, so without the controlling PC hardware, the data isn’t that useful anyways.
Is the code available?
Yup. Find it here