A long standing project (since early 2005) to log and provide real time graphing of wood, electric, or gas kiln firings. This project by necessity requires a hardware and software combination and through the years many have been tried with varying degrees of success. Most attempts are preserved here for posterity sake.

The most recent version of the hardware uses the Teensy 3.1 for the microcontroller, a custom made daughter board that has an SD card and phone jack to connect the sensors. The sensors are MAX31850K from Adafruit. The GUI is now handled with a customized interface for the amazing MegunoLink. While buying modular hardware and using software that requires a modest licensing fee adds to the overall build cost it makes the hardware and software a bit more accessible to the novice experimenter. Hopefully this will enable more people to get at their kiln data and improve their future firings and learn from the ones they have done in the past.

     

If you dig around in the archives you will find early versions of the code that relied on Python, WxPython for a GUI, and provided a front end for a custom piece of hardware. The hardware at that time was based on a microchip PIC microcontroller and addressed a one wire bus and a DS2760A to ultimately digitize two analog type K thermocouples. The combination of hardware and software was used to collect, display and log the temperature. Many variations of the code are here and all of hardware versions of the electronics also. Many early graphs generated with that hardware software combination are in the testing folder. Most of the work was done on the WxGauge and GUI versions. Its not very organized, but feel free to poke around and use what you need.

Enjoy... ED