Pyro
I am the author of Pyro, a simple piece of software to automatically plot out the temperature changes over time during the course of a firing.
It's a small python program that uses py qt for GUI. I purchased this pyrometer from Landtek. It's cheap, supports four thermoprobes, and best of all has USB out. My software is available for free, have at it, just send me an email, it's a private github right now.
For the geeks though, or more particularly anyone else who might be in the same situation that I was, trying to figure out how to read data from the thing, here are the details. Connect to the device with usb serial, communication is exceedingly simple, write a request, get an answer. That's it. Unfortunately, I only know of one request. There are no doubt other questions the device will answer, but, this is the important one:
170 85 1 3 3
Writing those five bytes to your serial connection asks the device
for a report of the current temperatures. It will respond with a 13
byte buffer. As an example:
85 170 1 11 86 26 96 109 96 109 96 109 226
I have no idea what the first four bytes are. Nor do I really
care. The four temperatures for the four thermoprobes are reported
in the next 8 bytes, two per thermoprobe. The values are reported
in 8 bit modulus where
96 109
indicates no thermoprobe. The 8 bit modulus encoding includes one
decimal digit, thus, the pair
86 26
is converted to degrees celsius as follows:
(26*255 + 86) / 10 = 671.6
My software merely repeatedly requests over and over, every second
to update the temp readouts, but records every five minutes to
draw the graph. At the time of this writing I've only used it for
one firing, but it was glorious.
- not needing to log temperatures in a spreadsheet, fantastic
- better time resolution in the curves
- at a glance indication if the kiln is increasing or decreasing in temperature, the readout is red or blue depending
- best of all, decimal accuracy when > 1000C !!!!!!! FINALLY