PC-Based Thermometer

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of developing a PC-based thermometer that utilizes a Negative Temperature Coefficient (NTC) thermistor as a temperature sensor interfaced to the computer for data logging. The design was originally developed by (Osterman, 2000) and the application was written in Delphi. The researchers fabricated the original
design, however they ported the application to Visual Basic. The advantage of Visual Basic is on simplicity and basic program coding. The device is intended to be used as a demo application computer interfacing and data acquisition. It was observed that on a different computer specification, a specific interpolation set of data is required to derive the relationship between temperature and charging time of the capacitor. The charging time is calculated by the software and it is important that no other applications or processes consuming significant amounts of resources is active during the calculation process.