A USB-to-serial converter forms the heart of an accurate USB temperature sensor.
This Design Idea presents a simple, accurate, and reliable design to measure temperature using the USB. Figure 1 shows the complete circuit of the temperature-sensor device. The heart of the sensor device is an FT232RQ USB-to-serial converter from FTDI (Future Technology Devices International). In addition to using the FT232 in its default UART mode, the FT232 works in a so-called bit-bang mode (reference 1, reference 2, and reference 3). This mode changes its I/O lines into a bidirectional data bus, which the user can fully control. The connection with the USB takes place in a standard manner, and the back end of the chip interconnects to an AD7814 digital temperature sensor from Analog Devices (Reference 4).