Just wondering if anyone has done any testing (or even used) an Arduino board in somewhat harsh environmental conditions. Particularly envrionments that experience large ambient temperature changes, such as in the range 0deg to 50deg C?
I would also like to hear from people who have built a thermally shielded enclosure for their Arduino, and what their experiences were.
I am wanting to put an Arduino is such a temperature hostile environment and would like opinions on what might work.
The chips themselves will work over that range. The main problem is if you get condensing humidity. You need conformal coatings to counter that.
Insulation will protect from external temprature changes but will suffer from internal heat building up. You can use a heat pump like a Peltier device to ship heat in and out of an enclosure.
How long will your device be exposed to this environment? If it's only an hour hour two then insulation may help, but remember insulation only delays the inevitable. I once built a device that needed to work at between +20 and -20 for a couple of hours, i put it in a hermetically sealed box with several packets of dried silica gel crystals, this worked fine.
Point taken regarding condensation build up. Perhaps rather than a passive device, a couple of fans built into its enclosure would help with both condensation and temp control. The average temp would be about 25C, but the extremes are the obvious concern.
put dust filters on the fans,
hot places tend to be dusty, if you have the power available I would consider a peltier like mike suggested, that would actually remove heat from the encolsure and can be hermetically sealed, rather than just blowing air which may be hot anyway ,
