![]() These seem very popular and well-supported in the hobbyist electronics market, so I picked a 2.8” TFT display based on the ILI9341 TFT LCD driver chip. ![]() Chinese company ILI Technology produces a range of low-cost TFT display controllers. While I had written a working driver for the camera in C for Linux just using spidev ( which even supports streaming the live video to a JavaScript-based web client via ØMQ), that wouldn’t suit a battery-powered setup. I wanted to build a self-contained & portable thermal camera device with an integral display and processor, all powered by a battery. And it was! The gamble paid off - that could have been a wasted £75! Once I had everything I needed, I hooked the whole thing up to a Raspberry Pi and used the Lepton 3 branch of the pylepton project on GitHub to verify that it was working. The breakout board itself is a great little project by Pure Engineering. I obtained a breakout board for the FLIR Lepton from Digi-Key for around £25 including shipping. 2 is now unavailable, but the current-gen FLIR One Pro with the same sensor resolution is £399.99.Īs soon as the broken FLIR One arrived, I tore it down and retrieved the shining jewell that is the FLIR Lepton 3 sensor. These devices contain a FLIR Lepton 3 160x120 pixel microbolometer.įor £75, I think you’d be very hard-pressed to source an equivalent sensor - the Gen. The stated symptom was that it just didn’t power on at all, which I guessed might be down to a power/battery fault and hoped it wouldn’t affect the actual sensor module itself. They are commercially available as components from electronics distributors such as Digi-Key, but I found that to be an expensive and difficult way to obtain them (the availability at the time I was trying to buy one was rather poor).Īfter watching a bunch of thermal camera-related Mike’s Electric Stuff videos on YouTube, I discovered that a good source of these might be the the small, smartphone-compatible thermal camera devices such as FLIR’s One and Seek Thermal’s Compact range.Ī few clicks later and I found a broken FLIR One Gen. This is also the expensive, difficult-to-source bit. This is the business-end of a thermal camera. I started off trying to find a microbolometer. ![]() Feel free to ask questions down in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer! 1 I wanted to get started with thermography without a huge price tag, so I thought I’d go all in and build my own! Obviously, this was a hugely involved process so I’ll cover a bit of each aspect here. Unfortunately, they’re also quite expensive, especially if you’re buying one just for playing around with rather than using in some commercial capacity like thermal surveying or electronics testing. I think the ability to view a part of the electromagnetic spectrum that is normally hidden from us will always be a strange and exciting thing. Thermal cameras have always fascinated me.
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