![flir lepton breakout board flir lepton breakout board](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/1034/1611/products/14670-PureThermal_2-_FLiR_Lepton_Dev_Board-02_800x.jpg)
- #Flir lepton breakout board driver#
- #Flir lepton breakout board portable#
- #Flir lepton breakout board pro#
- #Flir lepton breakout board code#
- #Flir lepton breakout board Bluetooth#
The code was relatively easy to port to ESP32 - at a high level it just involved swapping out the spidev API for the ESP32’s SPI Master API.
#Flir lepton breakout board driver#
I based the firmware 2 around my existing Linux driver for the FLIR Lepton 3. I just built this circuit as small as I could on a scrap of veroboard for now. I used a simple circuit with two PNP transistors to let the ESP32 control power to the thermal camera and display. I also wanted to be able to switch the whole device on and off with a power button/switch, while still being able to charge it via USB while off. This one has a Lithium battery charging chip on-board and breaks out all the ESP32 pins that I required for the project. The particular development board I ended up choosing was a WEMOS LOLIN32 board. It also has two usable hardware SPI ports, which I required to drive both the display and the thermal camera module.
#Flir lepton breakout board Bluetooth#
It has a fantastic ecosystem has integrated Wi-Fi and Bluetooth too.
![flir lepton breakout board flir lepton breakout board](https://cdn.hackaday.io/images/resize/300x200/9204491555862009163.jpg)
To drive the whole system, I ended up picking Espressif’s ESP32 platform. eBay is the best place to pick these up cheaply. In the hobbyist electronics market, these displays tend to come mounted on breakout PCBs with a number of other things added (resistive touch panel controller, SD card slot etc.).
![flir lepton breakout board flir lepton breakout board](http://anthony.lepors.fr/raspi-thermo-cam/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/breakout-board-v2-branchement_2.jpg)
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.
#Flir lepton breakout board portable#
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.
#Flir lepton breakout board pro#
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.