We decided to order to different types of thermocouple, one bared wires and one with round insulators. The bared wire thermocouple is the BARE-20-K-12 with AWG wire size of 20. The thermocouple with double hole round insulator is the DH-1-24-K-12 with AWG wire size of 24. This one uses the DH-1-24 insulator, which can endure the temperature up to 1600°C (2900°F).
Also today I tried to implement the LCD display using the Arduino Redboard. Basically, an LCD, or liquid crystal display, is a simple screen than can displays commands, bits of information, or readings from the sensor – all depending on how we program our circuit board. Our LCD is of type 16×2, which features two lines of 16 characters, and a backlight so that it can be used at night.
The LCD has a 16-pin male header attached to it along the top edge. Pin 1 is the pin closest to the corner of the LCD. Pin 16 is the pin closest to the center of the LCD. We connected to LCD pins as followed:
1 to GND
2 to 5V
3 to the center pin on the potentiometer
4 to Arduino digital pin 12
5 to GND
6 to Arduino digital pin 11
7 (no connection)
8 (no connection)
9 (no connection)
10 (no connection)
11 to Arduino digital pin 5
12 to Arduino digital pin 4
13 to Arduino digital pin 3
14 to Arduino digital pin 2
15 to 5V
16 to GND
The LCD has a chip built into it that controls all the individual dots that make up the display, and obeys commands sent to it by the the Arduino. The chip knows the dot patterns that make up all the text characters. To communicate with this chip, we used the LiquidCrystal library, which is one of the standard libraries that comes with the Arduino. Because the space on the screen is very limited, we could only do a few things with this screen like showing numbers, temperature, time, etc. Optimal, we would prefer a bigger screen so that we can show more information about our oven’s performance.
