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I am in the process of designing a data acquisition device that will be used outdoors, with temperature swings of around 30 degrees.

For this i need to scale the input to a voltage suitable to the adc and reference i am using, the initial offset of the circuit is a non issue as it will be calibrated out, however what concerns me is the temperature drift.

One way to be sure the drift won't be a problem would be to use resistors with a very low Tc, these usually are pretty expensive if i want a drift of less than 0.02% over the temperature range, so i was wondering if it was reasonable to assume that by using resistors of the same series and keeping them at the same temperature one could assume the drift will be reasonably equal in both hence canceling out or if that assumption is completely erroneous.

Thanks

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    \$\begingroup\$ Same series isn't as good a bet as a combination of the same value resistors off the same reel, but they're both bets. \$\endgroup\$ Commented Aug 13, 2020 at 21:51
  • \$\begingroup\$ the only problem of that is that in that way you can only do 1/n dividers where n is an integer bigger than 2 \$\endgroup\$
    – diegogmx
    Commented Aug 13, 2020 at 21:54
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    \$\begingroup\$ What ratio do you actually need? Series/parallel combinations for each resistor can do just about any ratio. And once you get down to 99% of the way there, you can use some other kind of resistor without much fear. \$\endgroup\$ Commented Aug 13, 2020 at 21:55
  • \$\begingroup\$ was thinking in 1.32 \$\endgroup\$
    – diegogmx
    Commented Aug 13, 2020 at 21:56
  • \$\begingroup\$ yet i could probably change the reference so that 1/2 can do \$\endgroup\$
    – diegogmx
    Commented Aug 13, 2020 at 21:58

1 Answer 1

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You could do it like this (resistor values can be scaled to whatever, obviously, just R and 8*R required):

schematic

simulate this circuit – Schematic created using CircuitLab

Since R5 is 24x the value of R1||R2||R3, its tempco will have very little effect on the tempco of the divider.

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