Also, because of its ability to produce an image without visible light, thermal imaging is ideal for night vision cameras. Thermal imaging of this type is often used in building inspection (to detect insulation leaks), automotive inspection (to monitor cooling performance), and medical diagnosis. By measuring this resistance, you can determine the temperature of the object that emitted the radiation and create a false-color image that encodes that data. Microbolometers are made up of materials which change resistance as they’re heated up by infrared radiation. The sensor inside the FLiR Lepton is a microbolometer array. This is known as the infrared spectrum, and it accounts for most of the thermal radiation emitted by objects near room temperature.Įlectromagnetic spectrum with visible light highlighted.

While most imaging sensors detect radiation in the visible spectrum (wavelengths from 380 to 700 nanometers), long wave infrared sensors detect radiation from 900 to 14,000 nanometers. It users the linux remoteproc facility and requires only a few percent of main CPU time to keep a full 9 fps display running.Electromagnetic radiation is all around (and within, and throughout) us and is comprised of everything from gamma radiation on the high frequency end to radio waves on the low frequency end. The video pipeline running on the PRUs is the most interesting contribution.

My code and designs can be found on github. I documented my experience on hackaday.io. I was successful and built my own camera that remains a work in progress. That interested me in using the PRUs inside a Beaglebone Black and later a Pocketbeagle to create a video pipeline to offload the real-time chore from the main CPU. I played with the Raspberry Pi and found it difficult for a user-space process to reliably keep synced to the camera. I started with a Teensy 3.2 based camera and was able to get an about 4 frames per second using a single SPI bus for both the camera and display. Over the course of a couple of years I made several different cameras as I learned how to reliability get data from the module. After borrowing a friend's unit repeatedly, I decided to design my own, aided by the availability of the FLiR Lepton 3.5 from.

I occasionally have use for one to monitor heat generation in something I've designed, and they are useful for myriad of other applications as well. Like a lot of people I always wanted a thermal imaging camera.

Lepton raspberry pi