M5Stack Launches Thermal2 Unit, an ESP32-Based Smart Thermal Camera Module
Designed as a successor to the original Thermal Unit, the new Thermal2 adds an on-board ESP32 microcontroller, button, and RGB LED.
Embedded device specialist M5Stack has launched a new sensor with integrated Espressif ESP32 microcontroller: the Thermal2 Unit thermal imaging camera.
"Unit Thermal2 is a data processing MCU-equipped [Melexis] MLX90640 thermal imaging acquisition unit," M5Stack explains of its latest design. "The MCU uses ESP32, which is capable of high and low temperature alarms, average, maximum and minimum values reading, and data caching via data processing."
The Melexis MLX90640 sensor at the heart of the device is a far-infrared (FIR) thermal sensor array with a 32×24 resolution, giving it 768 individual measurement points across a 110×75° field of view. Its ability to measure temperatures ranges from a minimum of -40°C to a maximum of 300°C (-40°F to 572°F), with a programmable refresh rate from 0.5Hz up to 64Hz.
To this, M5Stack has added an Espressif ESP32-PICO-D4 microcontroller module, which includes two low-power Xtensa LX6 32-bit microcontroller cores, 520kB of static RAM (SRAM) plus two banks of 8kB in the real-time clock (RTC), 4MB of flash memory, and 2.4GHz 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.2 radio, along with a user-addressable RGB LED, passive piezoelectric buzzer, central button, and a Grove-style I2C header. While the device comes pre-flashed with a default firmware M5Stack confirms it is programmable with the Arduino IDE or UIFlow, and that it can operate in standalone or I2C modes.
The Thermal2, which joins the company's Unit family of vision sensors as a successor to the original Thermal built around the same sensor, is now available on the M5STack store at $69.90 including bundled I2C cable.