I am interested in putting a thermal camera inside a bird nesting box but want to keep the Arduino/Pi unit somewhere more accessible. What is the maximum length of cable I can have between the camera and the Arduino/Pi please? I am hoping for at least 5m and thinking of using Cat5e cable with a pair for power. Also, what is the power consumption of the MLX90640 thermal camera? I don’t want to heat the inside of the box up too much. Thanks in advance.
It seems the i2c bus may work over Cat5e cable for quite some distance, depending on the pull-up resistors and the speed. It might work?
The datasheet says “Current consumption less than 23mA”, though I’ve no idea how much of that translates to heat.
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Many thanks for your helpful comments and speedy response Shoe. The i2c link you sent at least suggests it might work although maybe 5m of Cat5 will be pushing it I feel.
I saw the 23mA quoted in the spec sheet but took this to be just for the MLX90640 sensor itself and didn’t include any devices on the pcb, if any. According to my calcs (!!?) 23mA at 3.3v should be about 0.076mW which is negligibly small for my application. TBH I cant imagine what might be on the pcb to push the power consumption into the +10w level though but thought I ought to check.
Thanks again. Appreciated.