Make:

• DIY: Drinking Straw Light
• Sketching08 talk - Good Hardware APIs et al
• Ski Shelf
• HOW TO - Fix a scratched LCD
• Arduino Semaphor
• Spring constant measurement

You can use PicAxe and a DS18B20 temperature sensor to play around. Here are a couple o project I'm working on:

PicAxe + Twitter:
Read temperature sensor's data and update on twitter! (needs a computer with a serial connection)
http://steliosm.net/picaxetwitter.html

PicAxe + Twitter:
Read temperature sensor's data and update on twitter! (using the SimpleLan module)
http://steliosm.net/picaxetwitterudp.html

Stelios

How can you say the DS1820 is a better way to do it. You're comparing apples and elephants.

Rather than insulting the poster and saying he should have done it better, take a deep look at your own choices.

The DS1820 is a nice device, I've used it as well as the LM35 here. They're totally different devices. The 1820 is a digital device which communicated via i2c. The LM35 is an analog device which outputs the temperature as a voltage, 0.01V/celsius degree.

To use the 1820 is much more difficult for a novice, you have to deal with serial communication as well as handling the protocol. (And I realize you're probably linking to libraries to do it, but it's important to learn what is going on).

The LM35 is as easy as an analogRead() statement and some arithmetic. It is a much better choice for someone just starting out and wanting to learn.

The 1820 is also a few times the price of an LM35

As for the PicAxe issue. PicAxe is a pic microcontroller running a proprietary bootloader that you can only get from one vendor. It also implements basic in the pic itself so it's agonizingly slow.

The Arduino is an open source bootloader and development environment, which also means you can get hardware and support from countless sources. And the Arduino compiles native binaries on a processor the is faster to begin with so it's orders of magnitude more powerful than picaxe. Try doing 32-bit floating point division on a picaxe. It takes about 100uS on Arduino.

The PicAxe does have a closed-source bootloader and free (as in beer) tools to support the development. Being a PICmicro uC gives a big advantage compared to the others. PicAxe is faster to prototype, learn and develop. I still don't think that I need a uC running gazillion times faster than PicAxe to take a temperature reading.

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