Thermopile detectors for non-contact temperature measurement
LASER COMPONENTS has been working with Dexter Research Centre, a specialist producer of thermopile detectors. These devices are well suited for non-contact temperature measurement in applications such as health care, process control and environmental monitoring.
The company can supply a range of solutions for non-contact temperature measurement from individual sensors to a complete module. The Dexter Temperature Sensing Module is a ready to use, cost effective non-contact IR thermometer with a calibrated output providing an accurate target temperature.
This unit can be customised to accommodate a wide range of temperatures, power supplies, refresh rates and object emissivity. High memory reliability is assured by the TSM’s embedded error checking and correction mechanism. The TSM is housed in an industry standard TO-5/TO-39 package.
The output of the infrared sensor is amplified by a low noise low offset chopper amplifier with programmable gain, converted by a Sigma Delta analogue to digital modulator to a single bit stream and fed to a powerful DSP for further processing. The signal is conditioned by programmable (by means of EEPROM) FIR and IIR low pass filters for noise reduction of the input signal to achieve the desired performance and refresh rate. The output of the IIR filter is the measurement result and is available in the internal RAM.
The PWM/SDA pin can be programmed as a push-pull or open drain NMOS, which can trigger an external device such as a relay, buzzer, RF transmitter or a LED. This feature allows a very simple thermal alert device to be built without the need of any MCU and zero design overhead required for firmware development.