Thursday 8 May 2008

Take the temperature of your PC


Exactly how hot is your workstation? As temperatures start to rise in offices thanks to the Spring heatwave, we have found a device that will record interior and exterior temperature and display it on the task bar of your PC.

Award-winning designer Alberto Ricci Bitti has designed a simple microcontroller-free PC thermometer that requires no calibration. Cheap and simple to put together for the electronics assembler, it can be plugged into any free serial port. The chief components, circuit schematic and instructions can be found on the Ricci Bitti website, but some of the capacitors, resistors and diodes are available from Rapid.


Hackers may like to consider how the PC Therm could be adapted to reflect the heat from your keyboard as you hammer out a self-righteous e-mail, or the fumes from your brow as you curse the entrails of Bill Gates after Excel crashes for the fourteenth time this session. Or is that just me?

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