- Fri Jan 13, 2017 10:44 am
#60955
Erich,
There are a couple of advantages to having the NTCs switched to GND in parallel with say a 10k resistor as proposed:
- if the NTC is open circuit or short circuit for any reason (I assume you may perhaps be planning on the three NTCs being plugged in and measuring somewhere off the board), the voltage to the A/D remains within range.
- if you turn on a GPIO (switching on another NTC) by mistake before turning off the previous one, voltage to the A/D remains within range.
- you have essentially infinite temperature measurement range (NTC resistance can vary between 0 to infinity) - however resolution (A/D counts per degree) will reduce towards the extremities.
- you can select the parallel resistor to give you maximum measurement resolution around a point of interest within the range (assuming there is one). For example, if you are normally measuring room temperature (25C) and your NTC is 10k at 25C, you can choose the parallel resistor to also be 10k - and the pull-up resistor from 3.3V to be 23k (could be 22k + 1k if you want to use E12). Or, if you wanted to maximise resolution across your range of 0-90C, you could choose the parallel resistor to match your NTC resistance at 45C (midpoint of your range of interest) - and select the pullup resistor appropriately to give you 1V to the a/d converter when the NTC is open circuit.
If you decide to go with this configuration, you can calculate the NTC resistance based on the resistance calculation you previously showed - where the resistance you calculated is that of the fixed resistor and NTC resistor in parallel.
For parallel resistance, Rtotal = (R1 x R2) / (R1 + R2)
Assuming R1 is the NTC and R2 is fixed resistor and solving for R1:
Rntc = R1 = (R2 x Rtotal) / (R2 - Rtotal)
Depending on what accuracy you need for your temperature measurements, you may wish to chose a reference voltage - such as 2.5V from a TL431 - for the high side of your resistor divider, rather than the 3.3V supply to the ESP8266, which I am guessing may typically have a tolerance of +/-5%.