Chas over at PNW/Electronics writes:
I came across a stash of iButton T-sense 1-wire sensors.. so I grabbed a couple and decided to check out 1-wire.
Maxim makes a 1-wire device called the DS18B20. It’s a 9-12 bit temperature sensor with the possibility of being powered by parasitic power from the data line. This cuts the signal path down to a single DQ line and a return. A company called iButtonLink produces a nice little wrapper around this device called a T-Sense. There are a couple pieces of software out there that will allow you to hook these up to monitoring systems, I don’t have any though. These devices come with a 64-bit address code and can be daisy-chained which makes having many of these devices monitored very nice.
More details on PNW Electronics blog.