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The MLX90614 is an infrared temperature sensor. Therefore the cool thing about this is that you can measure the temperature of different surfaces.

My first idea was to measure the brake disc temperature of my bike.  In the first steps I need to accomplish two things,

1) Getting my LCD to work with my Arduino
2) Read out some Data of the MLX90614

I blogged about the first part yesterday, so todoay I decided to give the sensor a try. The sensor can be controlled via I2C bus. I used the I2CMaster library from here: http://bildr.org/2011/02/mlx90614-arduino/
In fact that page gives a pretty good overview about the wiring of the sensor.

The sensor itself needs 2 pull-up resistors on the data line and clock line as stated in the datasheet: http://www.sparkfun.com/datasheets/Sensors/Temperature/SEN-09570-datasheet-3901090614M005.pdf

The datasheet uses a bypass capacitor for stabilizing the current, but I did not use that, it seems my current is stable enough and the sensor in my test circuit works well without it.

Now I am electronically ready to measure my brake disc. Now I have to do some physical stuff as the breadboard will look too nerdy on my bike 🙂