Simple Datalogging Experiment – Temperature rise inside a Car

It’s been hot here in Australia. Maximums have been around 30C-35C all week and the humidity up over 50%. We get the occasional news story about the dangers of leaving kids and pets in cars on days like today and it is easy to understand why.

It’s been on my to-do list for a number of years, to actually log what the temperature rise in a car is, and I got a few hours today to set up an experiment and find out (an hour was spent just trying to find my temperature sensor!)

So here is the setup. An EV3 Brick and a NXT Temperature probe (Your LEGO Education supplier should have them in stock).

I started up a new experiment in EV3-G and set the Experiment Units Setup to have a Duration of 20 minutes and a Rate of 5 Seconds between Samples.

I started the experiment with the EV3 on my outside table in the shade for 2 minutes to get a baseline reading of the air temperature.

After 2 minutes I drove my car out of the garage and parked it in full sun on the driveway. I put EV3 brick and sensor on the passenger seat, making sure it was still in the shade inside the car.

20 minutes later (well, 18 if you count the 2 minutes resting on the table) and I went to retreive the EV3 and uploaded the data. You can clearly see the 2 minutes resting before it goes into the car at around 32C – 33C (around 90F). It then rockets up to over 44C (112F) in the space of just over 15 minutes.