Pico Technical Support and Discussion Forum

First of all, my god its hard to navigate this site in order to ask a question!!!
Secondly, i thought it was going to be a simple task to measure temperature with this ADC-11 usb device i bought. I dident think i was going to introduce more circuitry . I thought i could just add the Thermocouple. I'm not too happy.
Did i buy the wrong thing?

R

Hi and thank you for your post. Sorry for the difficulty you are facing.

The ADC11 is a data logger (or more correctly an acquisition unit) that measures voltages from 0 -2.5V, it has multiple inputs. By using the terminal board you have the flexibility to do many things. Attenuating larger voltages, putting shunt resistors, or even creating some circuitry to measure temperature (thermocouples, thermistors or even an integrated circuit sensor). The terminal board guide gives you some instructions on how to do this:

http://www.picotech.com/document/pdf/ad ... ons-en.pdf

The reason why you just can plug in a thermocouple is you need to take into account cold junction compensation. This why you have to buy a CJC chip.

If you wanted a dedicate thermocouple device you would need to go for the USB-TC08 which can take 8 thermocouple inputs from all thermocouple types (it uses mini thermocouple connectors).

http://www.picotech.com/thermocouple.html

Kind regards