“Create a low cost and portable thermal imaging solution for accurately measuring temperature.
Introduction
I have previously looked at the top end of the low cost thermal imaging solution with the use of the FLIR Lepton coupled to HDMI displays or the Avnet touch screen display,
Recently I came across two components from pimoroni which I thought would be very interesting to make a compact portable thermal imaging solution based around the MiniZed. These are the 1.3 Inch Colour TFT LCD which has an SPI interface and the MLX90640 IR Thermal camera which provides 32 pixels by 24 lines thermal image.
Both of these can be made to connect to the MiniZed with a little thought and would produce a simple low cost thermal solution.
Connecting the Thermal Camera and LCD
The thermal camera uses a I2C interface, while the LCD uses an SPI interface, both of these can be easily implemented with the MiniZed PS. However connecting the devices required a little thought as neither can be directly plugged into the board.
This is due to the pin out of the I2C camera and the LCD, none of the ground and power pins align directly with the power and ground pins on the MiniZed. Both peripherals will work from 3v3.
I want to connect the thermal imaging camera to the Pmod interface and the LCD screen on the shield connector. This allows the ground and signal pins to align with those available on the MiniZed.
For the power interfaces I will connect them via a flying leads to appropriate power connections on the Pmod and Shield connectors.
This means that we need to solder on the connectors in different directions, the ground and signal connections down from the bottom of the board while the power pin points up from the top of the board.”