• I've got my doubts about the accuracy of machine.temperature(). I've uploaded

    import machine; t=(machine.temperature() - 32) / 1.8; print('temp(C)', t)

    into a gpy which I let sit for a few hours unpowered on a 20C day. Soon as I power it up it runs the above & reports

    temp(C) 42.77778

    It seems unlikely for the core to heat itself up by 43-20=23C in the fraction of a second it takes to run that line of code?

  • @kjm You're right. I looked up the specific mass of silicon as 2.3 g/cm**3, but used 3.3 in the calculation.
    But then I thought: lets calculate the thermal resistance of the whole path from silicon to the outside air. The power consumption is known, and the silicon temperature too.
    That looked ok. I used an LoPy4, sitting on a PCB in an open box almost flush to the top of the box. At an average current of about 90 mA I had after 45 seconds a silicon temperature of about 52°C at 24°C environmental temp, but then it stuck at 52.66667 °C. By chance, this is 127° Fahrenheit, and 127 is a largest value of a signed byte. Tracing through the code it is indeed an 8 bit section of a 32 register, bits 22-29. So the software if fine, the hardware insufficient.

    a) machine.temperature() is useless. And according to the discussion in the net it is obsolete and not supported any more by espressif.
    b) the total thermal resistance is larger than 94°K/W

  • @robert-hh If the density of silicon is 2330 kg/m3 then a 3x3x0.4mm wafer is 3.6E-9 x 2.33E+3 = 8.4E-6 kg, so Q=703x8.4E-6x23=.58Ws? But you're right of course, machine.temperature is a BS number, reads in the 40s even after the gpy has been in the fridge(4C).

  • @kjm Since it's a lazy Sunday afternoon, I grasped some numbers to see, how much energy is needed to heat up the die by 23°C.
    The die size is about 3x3mm and a typical thickness is .4 mm, giving a mass m of 0.012g or 1.2E-5kg. The heat capacity q of Silicon is 703 J/(kg * °K)

    The Energy needed to heat up the die by 23*C is:

    Q = q * m * ∆t
    Q = 703 * 1.2E-5 * 23 = 0.192 Ws

    At 100mA/3.3V = .33 Ws/s, this energy is supplied to the chip within about half a second. Without any cooling, the die would heat up in 3 seconds by ~120°C!

    Luckily, this estimation ignores that the die is in a package which cools the device and increases the heat capacity. A thermal resistance number I found for a QFN48 package was 64-103°C/W on a standard PCB and 24°C/W for an optimal assembly. I do not know the thermal properties of the Pycom modules, so let's assume it is at the lower end, like 60°C/W, such that in the long run 0.3W will increase the package temperature by about 20°C. Obviously, the die will be somewhat warmer.

    Conclusion: Yes, the die in the package can heat up by 23°C within 3 seconds.

  • @robert-hh Fair enough Rob, I was just looking for an alternative to an ammeter to verify my deepsleeps are low power. I've had so much grief with deepsleep I thought core temperature might be simple-to-implement validation. There might be some C code that does a better job of reading the core temperature, last post at

  • @kjm It's a few seconds more, since the device had to start up until it executes these lines, which takes about 3 seconds and more. And the core's thermal capacity is pretty small. So it can heat up very fast.
    But anyhow: who cares. The machine.temperature() value is of almost no concern, at least in my opinion.

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