I've been playing this game too. Various useful items of commercially available kit have already been mentioned. Here's another source of good-value stuff:
http://www.welserver.com/cgi-bin/setup/profile.cgi(but the man hates Free Software with an American passion, I found) - pity - his kit is good, and he's the cheapest source of assembled temp sensors I've found.
I, of course, am making life hard for myself and making my own device (because I want to use I2C, not USB, on an embedded linux box). It currently looks like this:
and the I2C-8-channel 1-wire chip is detected but I haven't had any actual temp info out of it yet. Now that I'm half-way into installing some solar there is some presssure on to get this working as it's the only control mechanism.
Wyleu - what's wrong with RJ45/RJ10/11/12 as 1-wire connectors? It does seem a rather bulky standard, especially at the RJ45 size, but connectors and cable are cheap, and latching, so seem as good as any. It does seem a bit comedy to have a '1-wire' bus and then use 8-way cable to wire it, just because it's cheap, but this does provide a way to supply 24V or 12V for control purposes, which is quite handy in practice. It seemed to me to be easier to follow this (very vague) standard than make up something else.
