Stardance Devlog No. 1

I’ve made a rough schematic of my device for automatically measuring the Heat Deflection Temperature (HDT) of a given thermoplastic.

The specimen will be placed inside a furnace and heated at a rate of 1°C every 30 seconds. A defined weight will be applied to the specimen, and as the plastic begins to deform under the load, it will eventually bend far enough to close two electrical contacts.Once the contacts close, the system will record the current temperature as the HDT of the material.

The next step is to refine the mechanical design and work out a reliable way to detect the deflection while keeping the temperature measurement accurate. I also need to do the layout and maybe switch MCU when I need a more powerfull one.