HiLetgo GY-906 MLX90614ESF Non-Contact Infrared Temperature Sensor Module IIC I2C Serial for Arduino

I bought one of these to add to a mobile weather instrument to record road surface temps. I drilled a hole in a small project case for the lens, attached neodymium magnets to the top of the case, and when I want to collect data I just slap the case under the car and go. So far I’ve had no problems, and the temperature values are within 2 degrees of manual comparisons using a handheld IR thermometer. The programming is simple when using the Adafruit library.

I'm working on a personal project to build a non-contact thermometer as a concrete project to help teach me PIC programming, I2C, PCB design, and enclosure design for 3D printing. This breakout board has been convenient for prototyping on a breadboard (see picture). Also the price of the board rival the quantity one price for the sensor alone, so it's a good deal. Some things to note. The MLX90614 sensor comes in different sub-models. This board uses the BAA sub-model, which is what I wanted. It's not strictly medical accuracy--for that you need the more expensive DCI sub-model--but IMHO is good enough to screen for high fevers. I'm not allowed to put a non-Amazon URL here, so you'll have to google for the Melexis datasheet on the MLX90614; you'll have to read the datasheet to understand how to control the sensor. For what it's worth, I'm controlling the sensor in my application from a PIC16LF19156 8-bit microcontroller with a built-in I2C/SMBus interface. The board has a 3.3V regulator on it, but I've run it at 2.8V without modification. According to the datasheet, the sensor needs at least 2.6V to operate. The board contains pull-up resistors for SCL/SDA and a filter capacitor across power/ground. This board has behaved just as I expected and has been very convenient. I'm glad I bought it.

Great working thermopile type sensor. The adafruit library makes accessing this a breeze, up and running in less than a minute. It's nice that it also gives access to the onboard thermistor for ambient (part) temperature sensing in addition to the object temperature via the thermopile. HiLetgo GY-906 MLX90614ESF Non-contact Infrared Temperature Sensor Module IIC I2C Serial for Arduino

It has a pretty wide angle so you can't get too far away from a point source. First time using one of these, I connected it to an esp8266 and it works. I've had good experiences with the HiLetgo branding.

Sensor worked as advertised, not sure why you can buy a module cheaper than the sensor itself but that for a different review. I do highly recommend going to Adafruit website for support code if working on Arduino as the code they have available works well and give you a great starting place for developing your own.