Measuring Temperature with an Adafruit Panel Meter

We love weather logging stations around here, so the unusually cold temperatures we are seeing in Chicago this week led us to setup one of our Adafruit panel temperature meters!

The device functions as a digital thermometer, and for only $9.95, it is a great value.  It runs on 4V to 30V DC, which means that you can run it on as few as 3 AA batteries, a 9V battery, or a 12V battery!

We had a spare 8 AA battery pack lying around, so we charged up our batteries and connected them to the panel meter.  We chose to solder the connection for reliability, but you could also use a mechanical connection.

It was a cold night in Chicago!  -19 ºC is -2.2 ºF

Since our cheapo weather station had no way to tell us when it was low on power, we also added an Adafruit panel volt meter to our project so we could watch the battery voltage!  Here you can see that the 8x AA battery pack we are using is doing just fine.  They are 1.2V rechargeables, so 11 volts is actually more than I expected!