DIY an Arduino Scanning Thermometer

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Using an Arduino Nano and two rotary stages, this Maker hacked together a panoramic thermal imaging camera.

After ordering and finally receiving an infrared thermometer in the mail, the author of this project set to work to construct his own scanning thermometer. This type of setup acts like an IR camera, but instead of taking one instantaneous picture, it stores thermal data points that are then resolved into a coherent image.

For reading temperature data he used an Atmega328 Arduino Nano board and medical grade MLX90614 thermometer. Arduino is programed to spit measured temperature every 50ms over serial port.

Though the panoramic results can be fantastic, since the thermometer has to be rotated to each point individually via stepper motors on the rotary stages, a single image capture can take over an hour.

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