Adafruit MLX90640 24×32 IR Thermal Camera Breakout (110 Degree FoV)

You can now add affordable heat-vision to your project and with an Adafruit MLX90640 Thermal Camera Breakout. This sensor contains a 24×32 array of IR thermal sensors. When connected to your microcontroller (or Raspberry Pi) it will return an array of 768 individual infrared temperature readings over I2C. It’s like those fancy thermal cameras, but compact and simple enough for easy integration.

This version has a wide 110°x70° field of view we also have a version with a

narrower 55°x35° field of view

This part will measure temperatures ranging from -40°C to 300°C with an accuracy of +- 2°C (in the 0-100°C range). With a maximum frame rate of 16 Hz (the theoretical limit is 32Hz but we were not able to practically achieve it), It’s perfect for creating your own human detector or mini thermal camera. We have code for using this sensor on an Arduino or compatible (the sensor communicates over I2C) or on a Raspberry Pi with Python. If using an Arduino-compatible, you’ll need a processor with at least 20KB RAM – a SAMD21 (M0) or SAMD51 (M4) chipset will do nicely. On the Pi, you can even perform interpolation processing with help from the SciPy python library and get some pretty nice results!

This sensor reads the data twice per frame, in a checkerboard pattern, so it’s normal to see a checker-board dither effect when moving the sensor around – the effect isn’t noticeable when things move slowly.

Even better – We’ve done all the hard work here, with example code and supporting software libraries to get you up in running in just

a few lines of Arduino

or

Python code

Technical Details