Temperature is a quantity that is present everywhere just like the gases. Yes! you have a temperature, Your AC has a temperature, Your Refrigerator has a temperature, Devices like Mobile Phones, Laptops, Monitors, CPUs and so on (The list is big) give out heat that is a temperature may be of 30 to 35 Degrees! And so let us have the definition of Temperature (From Open AI) – “Temperature is a measure of the average kinetic energy of the particles in a substance. It quantifies the degree of hotness or coldness of an object or environment.”
Now the question is how we actually measure this quantity? Well thought, we use a thermometer or a RTD Probe. Now, suppose you are designing an Embedded System, or a Battery based System or a system (Conditional Monitoring) that measures the temperature of the surface and predicts the parameters. Would you use the simple thermometers (IR based) and measure the temperatures there every time! Consider how much power (Voltage and Current) shall be needed to power those. And so….
Low Power Digital Temperature sensors like ST STTS751 can measure the Temperature with Fast conversion time of 21ms and supports alarm limits on SMBus protocol, useful (For example) when you have designed an Embedded System that has a microcontroller on-board with Sensor peripherals, a cooling fan and a Battery. Using this temperature sensor, you can turn on the onboard cooling fan to cool down the system only in the times when the limit is reached and then turn off the fan when the temperature is normal, this way you save battery power.
On the comparison side, the ST STTS751 Temperature sensor requires only 2.25V to 3.6V of Voltage supply and temperatures from – 40 °C to +125 °C. The sensor supports popular I2C protocol and clock frequency of up to 400KHz.
New Technology have made the new sensors compact with little size and often fabricated in surface mount package. Such sensors are not made for breadboard and can be complex if you challenge it. So, we designed a breakout board on this sensor, put necessary voltage regulator and Resistors, Capacitors to give it some filtering. Additionally, we have included the STEMMA QT, SparkFun QWIIC, PCB CUPID’s GLINK compatible connectors for the I2C Bus.
We have prepared a simple Demo code to capture readings from your MAKERPALS STTS751 Temperature Sensor. The GitHub Repository for the same will be updated here shortly.