DS18B20

I am in the process of fine tuning my energy monitor and I am having an issue with the DS18B20 temperature sensors.  When ambient temperature is increasing or decreasing, the sensors appear to be working fine.  When ambient temperature stabilizes the measured value oscillates.  I have an emonGLCD and a emonTX lowpower temperature node which oscillate somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 degree F (sorry, I'm a yankee and we haven't discovered the metric system yet).  I have a DS18B20 attached to my emonTX as well, and it oscillates upward of 5 degrees F.  I added a 20 sample averaging loop to my code on the TX and it has not helped.  Any ideas?  

BTW: I am not setting the resolution in my code so I believe it defaults to 12 bit resolution. I have attached an image of the data I see on emonCMS.

Robert Wall's picture

Re: DS18B20

Do you mean regular oscillations or random fluctuations? I've never seen a problem of  "oscillations" reported - there have been problems with inadequate pull-up, however.

How are you getting to °F? The reason I ask is because the temperature out of the DS18B20 is in 1/16 °C and it would be nice to prove it's not a rounding error in the maths. (It's unlikely, and especially not for 5 ° changes, but let's make sure.)

Are the other quantities measured by your emonTx stable? I'm wondering if you have a noisy 5 V supply?

I'm not sure what the screenshot is showing - those look like ordinary heating and cooling curves to me with a bit of noise (a few tenths of a degree) thrown in.

dkeach's picture

Re: DS18B20

Fluctuations might be a better term.  I get to F by using sensors.getTempF(address_T1) in my arduino code.  I have also read data in C and I saw similar issues.  

I thought the same as you did about the measurements being a normal heating curve, but the delta T is far less than the hysteresis I have my thermostat set to. I have attached another screen shot of what I am seeing on my outdoor temperature probe which is hooked up to my emonTX.  Mother Nature just doesn't behave that way.

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