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Reply to "Anybody using a PC to monitor their smoker?"

Hi there,

Being a former instrumentations and control engineer, I have enjoyed this thread.

If anyone is looking for a economical data gathering device, the cheapest I found was from Dataq with the Dataq Starter Kit. Its $25 plus shipping and has 4 channels of analog input/output (I/O) and 2 digital input. It connects to the serial (RS-232) port on your pc. They also have a USB starter kit for $50 plus shipping. Both kits come with software to make the charting and graphing easy.

The hardest part is the sensors for this. What you can do is to get the polder or taylor probes as they are essentially 10K thermistors and integrate the probes in a wheatstone bridge and really linearize the signal and derive an analog output to be connected to the 10+/- VDC input.

I beleive there is a scaling and calibration capability in the software that allows you to scale the thermistor output and get the most out of the 10 bit analog to digital (A/D) conversion for the voltage output from the wheatstone bridge.

As I get time I will try and post on here my results but with extremely limited time available this will take some time...

Take care...

Preston
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