Today we announce the winners of the TMP103 and TMP006 evaluation kits. There were lots of great suggestions, thanks for your submissions.
Congratulations to Benny Boy, his idea for the TMP006:
Beekeepers can use infrared thermometers to locate (roughly, see www.beesource.com/forums) where a colony in a wall has built. Would be nice to hook the TMP006 up to two steppers on a tripod, then scan the wall to create an image. Made to mount on a camera tripod, you could trade out for a camera after, then overlay the temperature map.
and Chad‘s idea for the TMP103 :
I have a small greenhouse. One of the concerns I always have is that the soil temperature of my seedlings is in a good range and that the air temp in the greenhouse doesn’t get too high or too low. I’d use the TMP103 to measure general air temperature of the greenhouse. Then, the really cool part would be to mount the TMP006 to a servo, allowing a microcontroller to rotate the board to point it at different trays of plants and measure the soil temperature. That way I could alert if any were too low or high, as well as build a profile of hotspots in my greenhouse throughout the season.
Congratulations to the winners.
It might be worth mentioning that the TMP006 measures average temperature of everything exposed to it. The device itself has no focusing element, so it does not measure a small defined spot like a laser beam. Scanning it with a stepper, etc. would be useful only if you have a robot arm that physically trundles along from one measuring location to another (not just pivoting around from some distant point).
Now, you could do a remote pivoting 2-D scan if you have the TMP006 mounted at the focus of a concave mirror, for example. But I think you’d have to make sure the mirror itself is colder than the thing to be measured.