The MaxThermo library has just been released under the LGPL!

If you have a project that needs to know the weather (or at least the temperature, anyhow), then a thermocouple will come in very handy.

Thermocouples are pretty sweet temperature sensors that fit into electronics naturally as they leverage the thermoelectric effect: conductors which are subject to a thermal gradient develop a voltage. By “coupling” two different metals we can measure the difference in potential generated and figure out the temperature at the hot end.

The main problem is that the relationship between voltage and temperature is in the microvolts-per-degree range… so you need to be pretty careful when doing measurements if you want your conversions to be worth anything.

k-type thermocouple

The good news is there are many thermocouple-to-digital converters available, and these handle all the messy details to provide us with nice digital data.  When you have such a chip, all that’s left to do is figure out how to speak with it to get access to that scrumptious temperature data.  Cue MaxThermo.

Maxthermo is an open source library to interface with various thermocouple-to-digital ICs.  It can support many chips (the initial release works with the Max31855 and Max6675 converters) and is easy to use.

I’d love to hear your feedback about the lib, or if there are any other chips you would like to see supported.  Enjoy!