Sensing temperature

Sensing temperature seems to be an easy enough task using Arduino etc. You take a thermistor that changes resistance with temperature, such as a 10K ohm thermistor, which has a nominal resistance of 10K ohm at 25DegC. You take a fixed-value resistor, say 10K ohm, and make a voltage divider with the thermistor. You use analog input to sense the voltage of the divider and calculate the resistance from the voltage, then temperature from resistance. You can call this fixed resistor a serial resistor since it is in series with the thermistor. The following diagram is a voltage divider. The R_known is the fixed-value resistor. The R_unknown is the thermistor. A 5V voltage is applied to the resistors and a “sense” pin is sensing the divider voltage.

Then why am I wasting time to reiterate this simple task? Consider, the fixed-value resistor is made of a carbon film. What does carbon do at different temperatures? It changes resistance! So the “fixed-value” resistor you have is no longer fixed in value, especially if you live in places with temperature extrema, like where I live. I can get below 30DegC and above 30DegC outdoors in winters and summers. When you consider temperature, you can easily span almost 60DegC temperature range from a 25DegC nominal room temperature, where the fixed resistance values are specified, to a -35DegC where your data logger is logging data. If your fixed-value resistor doesn’t come with a temperature coefficient, well, it should! You can assume maybe 200ppm/DegC. This means 200 parts per million change of resistance per degree C. With -35DegC at 60 DegC below nominal temperature, you are looking at:

200*60/1,000,000=0.012=1.2% resistance change

This change of resistance could result in several percent of temperature reading error. The exact relation requires some calculus maybe I can discuss if there is interest. So you can expect to have several DegC or more error.

Here is what I noticed by driving two cars:

They both exhibit this behavior: After I park the car outside for several hours in cold temperature, I start the car, the “outside temperature display” says it is something like 10 degF. After several minutes, the temperature starts to drop to lower values.

Car 1: there is a few DegF drop. Say it will say 10DegF at startup, then it will say 7DegF after a few minutes

Car 2: there is as much as 15 DegF drop. If is says 10DegF at startup, it may say -5DegF after a few minutes.

Car 2 is newer than Car 1 but both cars are newer cars.

So my thought, although not tested (that might require disassembling the car computer), is that, the newer car is using a lower-grade serial resistor with the temperature sensor (thermistor) than the older car. This serial resistor must be inside the cabin, on the car computer’s board. When it is cold, its value increases considerably to maybe a couple percent higher than the nominal value. This trend of increasing resistance with decreasing temperature is shared between carbon and semiconductor (thermistor). So the effect of thermistor increasing resistance with decreasing temperature is countered by the effect of carbon increasing resistance with decreasing temperature. Then once the engine warms up the cabin enough, the fixed resistor warms up and the temperature display changes.

So how do you counter this effect i.e. temperature coefficient of fixed resistor? You can buy better resistors with less temperature coefficient, such as 20ppm instead of 200ppm. You will drop that effect to 1/10, which will be able to provide you the right accuracy. But these resistors aren’t exactly cheap. For instance, the 10K resistor I used as serial resistor in one of my designs has 10ppm/DegC:

279-RN73CA-10K

This resistor is about a dollar each. It is not only low in temperature coefficient, but also high in precision, 0.1% (i.e. it is at most 0.1% off from 10K when measured at nominal temperature)

When I don’t need this precision, just need a ~10K pull-up resistor for reset pin, I use this one:

652-CRT0805FZ1002ELF

This resistor is only 20 cents but it’s not too bad. 1% precision and 50ppm/DegC. I suspect the car 2 has something like this or even a bit worse! A 5% precision 200ppm resistor is only 10 cents. What would I use if I needed to make lots of cars?!