Wednesday, November 01, 2017

AMG8833 IR Thermal Camera

I tend to be absent minded. I turn on the kettle then step out back with my dogs. I've destroyed several kettles and I am trying my best to not do that. I have gotten much better at not leaving the kettle unattended. But it's always in the back of my mind that it can happen again. So one of the things I want to do is to build a sensor that can monitor the stove, turn off the burners when I've left something on the stove too long and notify me of both. I think I might be able to come up with something using the AMG8833 IR Thermal Camera and an ESP8266. The AMG8833 sensor is pretty expensive (about $40 US) but I'll build it anyway and experiment. A better solution would be to take advantage of a camera and some AI but I'm not certain that a normal camera would be enough. You can't monitor the surrounding temperature with a normal camera. I wonder if you can with an IR based unit? Perhaps a hybrid approach is enough? And then there's the huge question of privacy. Anyway, I'll work with the ESP8266 and the AMG8833 sensor. Then feed it back through MQTT to Node-Red or something else. In the meanwhile I'm also working on a water level monitor, a terminal server and an IR transceiver.