Design and Development of a PC- Based temperature monitoring system

Abstract

This paper describes the design and development of a personal computer based temperature monitoring system that is capable of monitoring temperature of surroundings and displaying the results on a personal computer (PC) screen.  The design of the work involves a circuit that measures the surrounding temperature using appropriate sensors and the sensor output is then converted to digital signals after due processing and conditioning of the signals. There is also an interface circuit configured to make it compatible with the PC hardware. This design consists basically of a temperature sensing circuit whose output is fed to the analogue to digital converter which feeds the converted digital signal to the interface circuit and PC. The circuit was designed, constructed, tested and found to perform satisfactorily as the temperature readouts on the computer screen (monitor) were fairly in good accord with readings from a standard liquid in glass thermometer. A much more detailed comparism however between the developed PC – Based monitoring system and a standard liquid in glass thermometer shows a difference of 3^OC which indicates that the  developed monitoring system appears accurate for temperature monitoring.

Keywords: Temperature monitor, personal computer, sensors, thermometer

Journal of the Nigerian Association of Mathematical Physics,Volume 19 (November, 2011), pp 465 – 470