200 Ohm thermistor: calculations

I've read several tips and info on how to work with a 10k Ohm resistor, and I've made one work very well, being just a bit off from a DS1624 digital temp sensor.

However, I now have to make Arduino work with a 200 Ohm thermistor. Any help on how to make it work with Arduino?

The usual simple circuit for a thermistor is a potential divider with a fixed resistor. So another resistor around 200 ohms would be suitable - having similar values means the divider voltage is most sensitive to changes in the thermistor's resistance.

However, that means about 12mA flowing, leading to a dissipation of 30mW or so. This means the thermistor will self-heat by many degrees, completely ruining it as a temperature sensor!

Two approaches in order of complexity:

  1. use a transistor or FET to switch on the current to the divider just before taking a reading, then switch it off. A reading takes about 110us by default, so the self-heating will be insignificant so long as don't read too often (10 times a second is reasonable).

  2. Use a larger fixed resistor, such as 2k2, then amplify the voltage across the thermistor with a rail-rail opamp (gain around 5 to 10). This keeps the self-heating down to a very low level (1mW dissipation in this case). It also means the thermistor is getting an almost constant current so that the voltage reading is a nearly-linear function of resistance (not the case at all for 1)