Future adds Arduino dev board for thermal imaging and IR sensing
The Thermaleye system is an Arduino-compatible development board which implements contactless temperature measurement and far-field thermal imaging at a resolution of 32 x 24 pixels.
It includes ready-made application software for thermal imaging and may be used as a platform for the rapid development of various new smart system and IoT applications. Potential use cases include presence detection and detection of abnormal behaviour to enable automatic control of functions such as lighting, climate control and safety alerts. It can also be used for people detection through low-resolution thermal imaging protects users’ privacy. Another use is eemote safety monitoring of devices at risk of overheating, such as chargers, batteries, fuses, high power equipment and kitchen equipment. It can also be used for preventive maintenance and remote temperature measurement of objects heated in a kitchen or in an industrial process.
The development platform is based on an Arduino-compatible thermal imaging shield. This shield board features the MLX90640, an infra red (IR)sensor from Melexis which has a 32 x 24 array of
IR photodetector pixels. The board also includes a Panasonic PaPIR pyroelectric IR sensor.
The outputs from the thermal imaging board are provided via an I2C interface to an edge computing board featuring an i.MX RT crossover processor from NXP Semiconductors. The i.MX RT1050 or RT1060 runs driver software for the MLX90640 and PaPIR sensors as well as for a 4.3-inch LCD colour monitor from Tianma.
With the edge computing board, Future Electronics also supplies sample application code for thermal imaging. The scalable system is based on the popular Arm Mbed operating system, which supports connectivity, security and real-time control functions. The powerful processing capabilities of the i.MX RT1050/60 enable thermal image processing and people detection functions to be performed locally, eliminating the time lag and bandwidth consumption associated with cloud-computing architectures, while enabling operators to guarantee the protection of users’ privacy.
The MLX90640 from Melexis performs contactless temperature measurement over a range from
-40 to +300 degrees C to an accuracy of ± one degree C. It is housed in an industry-standard four-lead TO39 package.
