Greetings. First post.
Just received my MLX90640 breakout from Mouser. First Pimoroni purchase. I attached the pins and ran the Sparkfun sketches on an Adafruit Feather M0 wired to my Win7 laptop. I had to edit some incompatibilities, but it ran pretty well… except for this.
These are three screen grabs: my blank ceiling, my right palm (okay, mirrored image…good to know), and my thermal webcam selfie. Counting from top left, every 82nd pixel is 20-30 degrees hotter than its neighbors. Nothing in the field of view is
really radiating 58 degrees. Can anyone enlighten me why my new thermal eye is behaving this way? Everything else about it seems ideal. Thanks in advance.
(I’m allowed only two links? I hope that limit expires quickly.)
Hallelujah!
Disciple
Nearly a week and no replies. Here’s my update.
On Thursday I had access to a Pi 3, so I followed the product link to the Github.com page and opened the readme. There I was utterly and soundly defeated. Hours wasted googling opaque and incomprehensible instructions, I got as far as make clean before becoming completely mired. Are there no instructions for beginners like me who don’t already know all the Linux code words and secret handshakes?
One voice on Discord suspected that the original sketch created the glitch due to a programming bug, so that will be my line of investigation. I just wish the takeoff curve here at Pimoroni wasn’t quite so steep for a non-expert such as myself.
Hallelujah!
Disciple
Still no sign of land support. How long is it? Three weeks, sir!
I have found time to condense the MLX90640 code from Sparkfun down to a simple loop that acquires values from the sensor, maps them to 5-bit values, and displays them as grey rectangles on a general purpose TFT display. Laptops and serial connections are no longer involved. Alas, this is the result.
There upon the TFT screen you can see the thermal shapes of my warm hands holding my cold camera before my hot face, no longer right/left mirrored. The same nine pixels are exhibiting the same undesirable symptoms as seen earlier. The flaw persists despite new software.
The evidence appears pretty convincing that my breakout hardware from Pimoroni has come with a defect. I post here because I honestly wish to communicate with support staff. Please reply and guide me to a resolution of this serious problem. Thank you.
Hallelujah!
Disciple
There is a contact us link at the bottom of the main Shop page. You can use that to directly e-mail Pimoroni support staff.
I personally don’t have any of that hardware so there isn’t much I can do for you. It is unusual for nobody to replay though, from my experience here anyway.
I’ll also @gadgetoid and @sandyjmacdonald for you. They both work for Pimoroni.
