MLX90640 Thermal Camera Breakout

by Pimoroni

A sophisticated, hackable, 32x24 pixel thermal camera breakout! Use it to monitor the temperature of your CPU or coffee pot, or to build your own heat-seeking night vision camera. Works with Raspberry Pi or Arduino.

It's perfect for building into projects - industrial, scientific, or just fun - and much more affordable than most thermal cameras. Our breakout makes it easy to use the camera with your Raspberry Pi or Arduino, using I2C and 3-6V supply. And it's available in two different fields of view, 55° (standard) or 110° (wide angle) depending on your preference.

The MLX90640 far-infrared camera is an array of 768 (32x24) thermal sensors that can detect temperatures from -40 to 300°C with approximately 1°C accuracy and up to 64FPS! The applications of this camera are manifold: measure the heat or heat dissipation of devices like CPUs, circuit boards, or electrical appliances; use it to identify thermal inefficiencies in your home; or use it for presence detection to identify bodies in complete darkness.

It's also compatible with our fancy new Breakout Garden, where using breakouts is as easy just popping it into one of the six slots and starting to grow your project, create, and code.

Features

  • Melexis MLX90640 far-infrared sensor array (datasheet)
  • 32x24 pixels
  • Field of view: 55°x35° or 110°x75°
  • Up to 64FPS
  • -40 to 300°C detection with approximately 1°C accuracy
  • I2C interface (address 0x33)
  • 3.3V or 5V compatible
  • Reverse polarity protection
  • Compatible with Raspberry Pi computers, and with certain Arduino models
  • Mechanical Drawing

Kit includes

  • MLX90640 breakout
  • 1x5 male header
  • 1x5 female right-angle header

We've designed this breakout board so that you can solder on the piece of right-angle female header and pop it straight onto the bottom left 5 pins on your Raspberry Pi's GPIO header (pins 1, 3, 5, 7, 9).

Software

Note that our Breakout Garden installer will not automatically detect and install the thermal camera software, you'll have to install it manually. Full instructions can be found here.

We've written software in C that you can use to generate images and video from the MLX90640 cameras.

SparkFun also provide an example Arduino/Processing sketch for the MLX90640.

Notes

  • Dimensions: 19x19x2.75mm (LxWxH).
  • Melexis state that up to 4 of the 768 IR sensor pixels in each array can be dead, with the unit still remaining in spec. Our software will automatically detect and correct for dead pixels by interpolating readings from adjacent sensors - if you are using alternative software we recommend that you configure it to take a similar approach.

7 customer reviews

a year ago
Used with the breakout garden. Works perfectly with the provided python library, just make sure to remove the film over the sensor! Within minutes you can start measuring distances and have them update live using the provided examples.
by Harry about VL53L1X Time of Flight (ToF) Sensor Breakout via REVIEWS.io
3 years ago
This little sensor works brilliantly. There's a lot of supporting code for it. The way the pins are staggered makes soldering easy. Just remember to remove the protective film! perhaps the one thing that it could change would be to breakout the XSHUT pin somewhere - on the side so it keeps the breakout garden profile.
by Daniel about VL53L1X Time of Flight (ToF) Sensor Breakout via REVIEWS.io
7 years ago
This thing is pretty neat and fast to respond. It does have issues if there is nothing in its path, as it will randomly jump to something very close, when in fact there is nothing there at all. But if you have something within its range, it detects changes very well.
by Chad about VL53L1X Time of Flight (ToF) Sensor Breakout via REVIEWS.io

User photos