Interfacing with MLX90614 thermal sensor

Forum 2005-2010 (read only) Software Interfacing
1

Hi,

I'm very new with the arduino as well as with the micro-controller world. I would like to interface with a thermal sensor MLX90614 from parallax to read temperature from it.

my questions are:

  1. the MLX take in serial command, so will this work for any i/o digital pins on the Arduino board?

  2. How do i send serial command with Arduino? I had looked at serial.write() but that only works for byte or series of bytes?

If i use Basic Stamp 2 microcontroller the command will be:

SEROUT pin, baudrate, [0, "!TEMR", $5A,$07]

(taken from parallax website)

how can i do the equivalent with Arduino?

Thank you so much in advance

2

This is the link for the MLX90614 from parallax
http://www.parallax.com/StoreSearchResults/tabid/768/txtSearch/MLX90614/List/0/SortField/4/ProductID/539/Default.aspx

3

in case you didn't find it: one answer can be found in this thread.

http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1241012329

The Parallax/Melexis system will communicate through serial but there seem to be some quirks. The short answer is to use the newsoftserial library. You can download this library and add the folder to the libraries folder of your Arduino application folder.

The newsoftserial library can be found here (to the best of my knowledge.. which is not much past beginner)

http://arduiniana.org/libraries/newsoftserial/

I have been able to get mine running.. pretty easy by following the last few posts on that other thread.