After my blinking led project using Arduino I now moved on to my real project: controlling the cooling system. I am approaching this step by step. The first phase was measuring the temperatures and showing them on a screen.
First I quickly attached some wires to the LCD to connect it.
I created a sketch that just showed some text on the screen.
Next I added dummy values representative for the end result. From left to right it will show battery, controller and motor temperature. On the second row the speed of the pump in that cooling loop.
To measure the temperatures I wanted to use a DS18B20 sensor. It took me a while to find one that was mountable with a thread.
Next I updated my sketch to show actual temperatures. That however caused the LCD become very instable and scrambled.
When I did not define Serial.begin it did work (I found that out 03:00 in the night), but was of course not the structural fix. In the end it turned out I used the Tx communication pin (pin 1) for the LCD. After fixing that it worked flawless.
Currently the screen shows tree actual temperatures.
The pump speeds are still dummy and the temperatures are not used for anything yet. Next step will be adding a function that translates a measured temperature to a pump speed.
