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MLX90393 Breakouts Commercially Available

A project log for 3D Magnetic Field Scanner

Capture interactive models of magnetic fields with your 3D printer

ted-yapoTed Yapo 02/18/2017 at 21:040 Comments

Sparkfun has made an MLX90393 breakout board the first in their new SparkX series of products, as mentioned recently on the Hackaday blog. I'm not going to make this log an advertisement for them, but if you wanted to get started with this sensor, this is a reasonable way to do it.

(image linked from SparkFun's site - click here for their product offering)

I haven't used one of these breakouts personally, but they seem to have the basics covered. There's no mention if the board contains nickel (ENIG finish) or if the capacitors are special non-magnetic types (I can pick up Adafruit's HMC5883L breakout with a magnet due to the ferrous terminals on their SMD capacitors! - but that probably doesn't matter if you use it as a compass and perform hard iron calibrations). If you are using these things inside variable magnetic fields (especially over very wide dynamic ranges), any ferromagnetic material like that can cause problems as it becomes slightly magnetized in the strong regions of the field, then is mis-calibrated in subsequent weak regions. But, even if it has nickel on the board and iron in the capacitors, it should work well enough for almost all practical uses.

Anyway, Sparkfun said nice things about this project and my driver code, so they must know what they're doing :-)

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