• Hardware consists of an LPC54018 evaluation board, a Resistance Temperature Detector (RTD) and a MOSFET drive circuit.
• A MAX31865 temperature sensor amplifier converts the temperature measured by the RTD into digital data and transfers it to the processor via SPI bus every tenth of a second and averaged every second. The IC protects against and identifies multiple fault conditions.
• The processor outputs a 30KHz PWM signal (above hearing range) which controls the gate of an N channel MOSFET in order to regulate the power supplied to an electric DC heater up to 100V DC.
• The firmware, written in C++, implements a PID algorithm to dynamically adjust the PWM output signal and regulate the temperature to the user defined temperature set point.
• The firmware outputs time, temperature and duty cycle data to a log file whose data can be displayed in graph form in an Excel spreadsheet using an embedded VB program. The user is requested to specif