Temperature Logging Part III: The Exciting Conclusion

Some pics of the final state: You might notice an extra button. I decided to write to EEPROM rather than an array after all. The reason was an unreliable power situation. A 9V battery lasts for a few hours and I didn't want to lose hours of data at the last second. So we have a switch for power on/off, a button for "send data" and a button for "start collecting data". The last one is I can control when the EEPROM starts getting overwritten the next time I turn it on.

That relatively minor change forced a paradigm shift in what processing was done where. Originally, I was just reading the voltage ratio from the pin and sending it to the PC that did the work to convert to degrees. The pin reports a value in 10 bits (i.e. 0-1023) but the EEPROM stores only bytes (i.e. 0-255). I could have renormalized to the smaller range, but only at the loss of a lot of precision. Instead, I now calculate the temp right on the Arduino. Surprisingly (to me, anyway), you can use the regular math library functions like log(). So then I end up with a temperature that practically speaking won't get above 255 or below 0, and even if it did I could add or subtract a constant to recenter it to my working range. I will describe what temperature I was logging in another post, but for now here's the pretty graph.