Temperature Data Logger

Added 10th Feb 2011

Summary:

The idea of having a temperature data logger is not new and there are lots of products that already do that. So why design my own? Well because it will be cheaper and do exactly what I want it to do. This exercise should also include getting code written that I can use in other projects.

Concept:

So the General outline is to have a board monitor a minimum of two temperature sensors and record the results to a USB Flash / Pen drive. Use real time clock (RTCC) to time stamp loged data and have a LCD and key pad to access it.

So here as you can see I'm going to use a PIC24 as this has an internal RTCC, Serial or SPI/I2C interfaces and plenty of ADCs. Key item to note is the FTDI USB Host that I'll use. This is part number VNC2 and allows me to talk to the USB flash drive using DOS like commands (ie DIR, MKDIR) as well as read write byte-by-byte. I could use the Microchip Libraries and have my own USB Host interface - but to be honest this looks like a easy route and will do what I want without the hassle of learning USB from scratch (Maybe do that another day.!?).