Grid-Eye Module Test

Grid-Eye Module Test

Panasonic Grid-Eye is 8x8 infrared array sensor.

This sensor supports I2C interface and you can get each 64 elements temperature data at 10Hz rate. 

There is a great software example to test the sensor using Arduino here and the processing code is available here.

Test Setup

Here is my test setup. 

Using Arduino Uno for this quick test.

Grid-Eye has two versions of power supply voltage 3.3V and 5.0V.

I am using 3.3V version. 

VIH of Arduino seems to be 3.0V, so as long as the I2C pull-up resistor value and bus speed are not so high, it should work properly. 

(Since it only has interrupt output and I2C, I just checked VIH.)

You can enable thermal image with your phone!

       

Test Run

Here is the video running the processing code.

There is 8x8 grid and the number in each grid is the temperature reading from the sensor.

I am moving my finger left and right, and as you can see, the red part (high temperature) is moving left and right as well.

If you want more pixel or resolution, use lepton and check this post!

                 

Featherboard M0 Basic Proto

Featherboard M0 Basic Proto

Featherboard M0 Basic Proto is very simple design and easy to use ARM M0 based board.
Arduino IDE supports this board and most of the sample code works with it.
The great feature is that it has a battery connector and it can be used as portable devices without having extra board like other MCU boards.
The MCU is actually same as Arduino M0/Zero which is  ATSAMD21G18 48MHz, but the board is much smaller. The technical details are available here.

Featherboard has other versions with WiFi, Bluetooth, and so on, so depending on what you would like to do, you can get the one with those features.

Setup

Follow the setup instruction here and here.
How it works is a little bit different from the Arduino, but once it set up, it would be very easy to switch between Arduino and Featherboard.

Once you install the necessary software, it generates most of the source files under your user folder which is \AppData\Local\Arduino15\packages.
If you prefer not to use the predefined APIs, you can refer to these files and generate your own functions.