general questions

[mookie]

guys,

I for the most part know nothing about electronics. ive been playing lately with the arduino and the fez panda trying to learn new things and then i was just hit with a problem at work which has finally brought me here.

I work with industrial equipment and in this case, it is a robot that is placing molds into an oven. the problem is that at the beginning of the day, the mold is 70 degrees or so, by the end of the day, the mold is ~330. the mold is physically expanding and changing size which makes it difficult for the robot to know where the holes it is picking the part from is located.

my plan is to take an ir thermometer and package it to read the temperature of the part and offset the robot.

im willing to use an atmega16 or atmega 8 for size reasons. because im lazy and dont want to run a cable all the way back, i figure i could integrate a poteniometer into the mix and just feed back a 24v signal when the temperature has reached a specified value.

i guess im asking 2 questions

1. is the chip that i want to use the right one for the job
2. what is the correct way to use a 24v signal and convert it to 5v so that i can use it with the chip that im using?

 

[(*steve*)]

1) Who can say? It doesn't seem unreasonable.

2) For low power use, a simple linear 5V regulator will do the trick. because your input voltage is almost 5 times the output voltage, the regulator will dissipate four times as much heat as your circuit. As long as the total dissipation is 5 watts or less, a relatively small heatsink will be all that you require.