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Prototype Bring Up
08/04/2026 at 06:06 • 0 commentsI've got the prototype assembled. It seems to be measuring ambient temperature pretty accurately, and I've also done some ice point testing. Only problems were the thermocouple connector and a very dumb mistake related to the pilot indicator connection. You can probably find it on the schematic. Here we are reading out ambient on a multimeter. Remember the 10X division?
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PCB Layout Complete
07/03/2026 at 21:23 • 0 commentssup, the pcb layout is complete. see below:
The big rectangle whole in the middle is a place for the 9V battery to lay. I figure this is the best way to mount it in a case, in the middle of the circuit board so it can sink the center of gravity of the device. Otherwise observe the isolation gap. I did absolutely no analysis on how wide this isolation gap should be. Hopefully no one uses this to do thermal analysis on their tesla coil or anything like that. If they do it will probably end badly.
The pcb routing and placement is defs sub optimal at this point. No power planes at this point and long traces. I don't really care though. -
Powering the Probe
06/20/2026 at 02:36 • 0 commentsI would like to use a 9V battery to power the probe. The circuit is actually going to drink quite a bit of current, however. Particularly when it's in 100X mode:
This results in:
5-10 hours operating time should be fine though. Maybe in the future an option for an auxiliary power supply will be added so the probe can be used for very long time scale logging.
There is also a low battery detection circuit:
This circuit triggers a low battery indicator when the 9V battery reaches ~6.5V.
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A Deeper Overview of Signal Chain Error Budget
06/12/2026 at 05:16 • 0 commentsHere is the measurement signal chain again:
The AD8495 is used with a K type thermal couple. This is gives an output of 5mV/deg C with a +/-2 deg C non linearity error. The AMC1301 has a maximum differential input voltage of +/-0.25V, so without the 10X division this means a maximum temperature of 50 deg C, and a maximum temperature of 500 deg C with the 10X division. The NCS333ASN2T1G buffer is needed, because the AMC1301 has an input bias current of -30uA. This would give a voltage offset of -27mV without the buffer. The NCS333ASN2T1G has an input bias current of 400pA and an offset voltage of up to 10uV. The input bias current generates a negligible offset. The offset voltage will add a 0.002 deg C error with 1X division and a 0.2 deg C error with 10X division. The AMC1301 has a gain of 8.2 with an error of +/-0.05%. The INA128 gain is then set to 2.439, so the final output is 0.1V/(deg C) or 0.01V/(deg C). The INA128 has an output offset voltage of 243.9uV.
Let's see if we can add up all these errors. Basically we have +/-2.2 deg C or +/-2.002 with 10X division plus +/-0.05% gain error. Plus another 0.0024 deg C or 0.024 deg C from the INA128 offset voltage. This does not include errors from resistor tolerance.
As for noise, we have 32nV/sqrt(Hz) from AD8495 times a full system gain of 2000 is 64uV/sqrt(Hz). We then have 62nV/sqrt(Hz) from the NCS333ASN2T1G times a gain of 10. so 620nV/sqrt(Hz). Adding these two together we get ~64uV/sqrt(Hz). Multiplying this by this system bandwidth ~10kHz, we get an output noise of 6.4mVrms. This corresponds to about 0.2 deg C of noise in 1X mode and about 2 deg C of noise in 10X mode. This might turn out looking like a lot of noise, but the bandwidth can always be lowered to reduce it.
No doubt a lot of this is wrong, as I probably did some incorrect math in there somewhere. But hopefully it's a good order of magnitude estimate.
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Schematic Rough Draft
06/09/2026 at 21:28 • 0 commentsI have made some progress on the schematic. Most of the components are down, but I have not calculated many of the values yet. As you can see, we are just using the AD8494 thermocouple amplifier combined with the AMC11000 for isolation. There is also a selectable division so the output can go to either 50 deg C full scale or 500 deg C full scale. This corresponds to 0.1V/(deg C) or 0.01V/(deg C) respectively. Other than that there are just a bunch of linear regulators to generate different power rails, and a low battery detection circuit.
schuyler4