Words cannot do justice to these temperature sensors.
They look just like a transistor with a 3 pin TO-92 package. Pin 1 is Ground and pin 3 is Vdd. The "special sauce" comes from pin 2, which uses Maxim's proprietary 1-Wire interface.
Each sensor has a unique serial number and you can daisy-chain several sensors on the single 1-Wire bus. You can query each sensor indvidually and receive the temperature in a 9 bit response.
For even more specialness, you can disconnect Vdd and run them in parasitic mode.
did we mention we like them?
