A TStik customer wrote: I purchased the TStik dev package last week and have had great success with it. I noticed the recommended environmental temperature range is only from 0 to 70 degress celcius.

The main issue here is the Lithium battery on the NVRAM. The battery will quite working at low temperatures (it will recover when warmer), and will die an early death at higher temperatures (it will bake itself dry). They just don't make Lithium batteries for extreme temperatures. The rest of the components are not a problem, in fact, some are industrial temp range already - -40 to +85 C.

CMOS parts rarely complain when it's cold. Immerse them in liquid nitrogen and they would last forever. You want to avoid extremely rapid thermal cycling,obviously, but in general, cold is OK.

When CMOS gets hot, it gets slower, which can be a problem. Also, all electronic components don't last as long at higher temps, for a whole bunch of reasons. For one, all the die and packaging are chemical compounds and at higher temps, there is more undesired migration of the unavoidable impurity atoms. So eventually the compounds change enough that the parts don't work properly.

I would like to deploy your hardware in a box with other equipment. This box will be mounted outside. It will face temperature extremes from Alaska to Hawaii. I also have the requirement to package the system in an explosion proof housing. Do you have any offering or information about using your product in these conditions. Have any of your OEM customers solved these problems.

The equipment in the box, if powered, will heat itself. TStik gives off enough heat (about 1 watt) that if you insulate it in a cold environment and keep it powered it should be fine. Avoid anything over 70 deg C if possible by using a fan or some good convective circulation to an external heatsink.

Add a DS1820 temp sensor (available in our store, and built into the TILT.Pro socket board) to the external 1-Wire net and measure the temp under actual use. Then you could use that to drive a fan or heater controlled with DS2406 switches, or I2C registers.

Also, store your app in flash, and use an NTP service to synch the time. This is trivial to do, and then you don't care if the battery quits or not.