“My local Department of Health got in touch with me because they needed a way to track the body temperature of their employee’s health on a daily basis during the 2020 Covid-19 crisis. Normal, off the shelf IR thermometers were starting to be scarce in supply, so I was asked if I could produce a design for a DIY version.
This design relies heavily on the work done by Aswinth Raj in this post: https://circuitdigest.com/microcontroller-projects…
I wanted to make some design changes in a few significant ways: I wanted to make the enclosure as fast to manufacture as possible, opting for a laser cut flat pack design over 3d printing. Given that supply lines are presently strained, I wanted to bring the rest of the BOM down to as sustainable and cheap as possible. I’ve swapped the genuine Arduino Micro for the generic Arduino Nano. Normally I’d advocate for genuine Arduino hardware, but here, going cheap an ubiquitous makes more sense.Let’s talk about the MLX90614 sensor - especially the specific designation of it. The extremely common BAA version has a 90 degree field of view that is completely inadequate for this project. This documentation uses the BCH designation, which uses a 12 degree FOV and reports more reliable temperature readings. As of this writing, stock has been short on this version, but keep checking on Digikey and Mouser for supplies.
Supplies:
1x MLX 90614-BCH IR thermal sensor
1x Arduino Nano CH340
1x 128x64 OLED i2c display
1x .1uF capacitor
1x 9v battery connector
1x temporary pushbutton
Hookup wire
9v battery
3mm baltic birch plywood”