M5Stack MLX90640 cheap thermal camera for a heat map.

Another project that i have started of by buying a thermal camera sensor which is capable of showing thermal heatmap in 32×24 pixels. You see the center spot temperature as well as MIN and MAX of all pixels. This makes it very useful in many applications such as searching dog poop in night time from the yard or then as eg. in CNC applications to check lasering temperatures or routing bit temperatures.

What makes the M5Stack super cool for CNC applications is that the eg. the M5Stack basic is programmable using arduino IDE over usb. The module has even wifi connectivity and it costs around 30EUR. The module have inputs and outputs so you could program it to sense if temperatures rises above 150 degree when sensor is pointing to a router bit which would trigger the CNC machine to pause and lift the router bit up from the work piece to prevent breaking bits because of too hot friction temperatures.

There are sample projects for each sensor M5Stack offers and i used a MLX90640 sample project which i modified to be able to show negative temperatures. The original code was not able to show values below 0 degrees. MLX90640 can show temps from -40 to 300 degrees celsius.

Sample code can be found here:
https://docs.m5stack.com/#/en/unit/thermal?id=example

Should you need the code for negative temperatures -> Just contact me from the bottom-right side of this page.

PARTS

M5Stack Core Basic
M5Stack Unit MLX90640