I'm working on a humidity controller which also controls the temperature inside a chamber.I'm done with the hardware (though i'm not the one behind the design)and which was originally designed with a 12 bit external ADC and an 89s52 uc and I replaced both with PIC 16F877A uc and I use the 10 bit internal ADC.
Other hardware details are (I can provide the schematic though it seems cumbersome).
- temperature sensor -PT100
- humidity sensor - SY-HS-220 (datasheet)
- +Vref for ADC - 1.235V and -vref =0;
I roughly checked the voltage across the 2 ADC channels by replacing the sensors with a 500 ohm pot (not concerned about the errors at this point) and got the following figures
proposed temp | voltage @ ADC
- 5 oC--------------1.650v
- 6 oC--------------1.660v
- 80 oC-------------2.480v
proposed humidity | voltage @ ADC
- 30% (990mV)--------0.098V
- 31% (1023mV)-------0.101V
- 32% (1056mV)-------0.104V
- 33% (1089mV)-------0.107V
- 34% (1122mV)-------0.110V
- 40% (1300mV)-------0.128V
- 90% (2970mV)-------0.29VI want to use this hardware for the following requirements
- Temp. measurement - 5-80 oC, 0.5 oC resolution
- Relative Humidity - 30-90%, 1% resolution
And my concerns are
- Should I have to change the reference voltage to 2.5V as I can see the maximum voltage to be measured is 2.48? Or that voltage is out of a mistake since the original hardware is designed with 1.235V
- is the voltage at the ADC in(of temp sensor) adjustable so as to make it within 1.235V (so I think better performance) by some minor hardware changes (like changing a resistance value to change gain of amp)
- are my requirements achievable with a single ADC configuration as I'm concerned about the rough figures I got (ADC input values for temp and humidity are not comparable or that too a mistake?) ?
- for the temperature I could measure only with 1 oC in steps as the RTD chart (For European Curve, Alpha = .00385, ITS-90)was provided with 1 oC increments. To measure 0.5 oC resolution is it OK if I divide the change in voltage for 1 oC increment by 2 (assuming the curve is linear, or not!?)
- How to decide efficiently the sampling time of ADC (considering the facts that the sensors respond slowly, transient voltage fluctuations in the line etc.)
- Finally how ADC values are converted to equivalent process values.? (Excuse me if the title of question matches here only)
- By a table look up? (in my case 150 values(for temp) + 60 values(Rel humidity) ) or can I use some calculation ? (if yes, how to get a linear relationship between the ADC values and process values) .which method is efficient in terms of accuracy?
Re: Converting an ADC value to equivalent Temperature?