MLX90614 IR Thermometer Hookup Guide
jimblom Introduction
Is your IC too hot to touch? (Too scared to even chance it?) Need to monitor for temperature transients so you can flip a fan on or off? Just want to create your own, hackable non-contact thermometer? Sounds like a job for the Melexis MX90614 Infrared Thermometer!
Or if you want an IR thermometer integrated into an Arduino-compatible evaluation board, check out the SparkFun IR Thermometer Evaluation Board.
The IR Thermometer Evaluation Board is equipped with an MLX90614-ABB -- a simple-to-use, but very powerful single-zone infrared thermometer, capable of sensing object temperatures between -70 and 380°C. Using SMBus -- an I2C-like interface -- to communicate with the chip means you only need to devote two wires from your microcontroller to interface with it.
Covered In This Tutorial
This tutorial aims to quickly familiarize you with the MLX90614 IR thermometer and demonstrate how to interface it with an Arduino. It covers hookup of both the bare sensor (to an Arduino) and the SparkFun MLX90614 Evaluation Board. It dips into theory, paraphrases some datasheet tables, demonstrates example circuits, and introduces a new Arduino library.
The tutorial is split into the following sections:
- MLX90614 Overview -- A brief introduction to IR thermometer theory and the MLX90614's specifications and interfaces.
- Evaluation Board Overview -- A quick rundown of the evaluation board's features.
- Hardware Hookup -- How to create a circuit around the bare sensor and/or interface with the evaluation board.
- MLX90614 Arduino Library -- Installing and using the SparkFunMLX90614 infrared thermometer library.
Suggested Reading
This tutorial builds on a few lower-level concepts. If you're unfamiliar with these topics, consider checking out those tutorials first: