Awesome project. But $300 is still quite steep for a thing I might maybe use once a year. I really wish these thermal sensors came down in price...
The sensor itself is 160. There is no getting around that.
DIY-Thermocam: A low-cost thermal imager based on the FLIR Lepton sensor
21–30 of 97 posts
Re: DIY-Thermocam: A low-cost thermal imager based on the FLIR Lepton sensor
#22$300 160x120 @ 9fps FLIR Lepton, and its a DIY kit. Hilarious. Meanwhile INFIRAY P2 Pro/T2S+, SNDWAY SW-8256 is a ~$200 _25hz_ 256×192.
Indeed, smartphone addons are much cheaper and might be a good option, too!
Re: DIY-Thermocam: A low-cost thermal imager based on the FLIR Lepton sensor
#23I would not call a FLIR Lepton affordable for everyone.
Do you know of a good, lower-price substitute?
You can get MLX90640 based devices for under $50, but the resolution is 32x24 instead of 160x120
https://www.melexis.com/en/product/MLX90640/Far-Infrared-The...
Re: DIY-Thermocam: A low-cost thermal imager based on the FLIR Lepton sensor
#24Can you make a slightly crappier version with a much cheaper visible spectrum sensor? I don't know much (obviously) about how they work, but intuitively it would seem a bit weird to me if they just happened to be restricted to exactly the same part of the spectrum as our eyes as a hardware limitation. Can you ignore data about visible red and higher in firmware, and get a thermal image that's obviously not as good as…
If you remove the infrared blocking filter (hot mirror) from many digital cameras, they can see very shortwave near infra red. Forward looking infrared (FLIR)[0] cameras detect long wave infrared, which is what you need for a "thermal" camera.
[0] quite what is "forward looking" about them I don't know
Re: DIY-Thermocam: A low-cost thermal imager based on the FLIR Lepton sensor
#25For the people saying "this isn't affordable," decent thermal cameras range in the thousands of dollars.
It still isn't affordable. You can get a phone add-on from FLIR for $180/$200. This is a great exercise in building stuff for yourself but not affordable at all. The thousand of dollars cameras you refer to have very high resolutions which are really not the use case for the curious maker that would be interested in such a project.
The DIY-Thermocam also works with the FLIR Lepton2.5, which is slightly cheaper (but has a lower resolution): https://store.groupgets.com/products/flir-lepton-2-5
But I agree that the price might be too steep for the curious maker who does not have a serious use-case that satisfies the investment on the long run
Re: DIY-Thermocam: A low-cost thermal imager based on the FLIR Lepton sensor
#26Was curious and found this (somehow both terrible and amazing) video, of various everyday human activities, viewed through a good high resolution thermal camera: https://youtube.com/watch?v=48bwQVa0AQc
(Note, there are a couple of moments that are very NSFW.)
Re: DIY-Thermocam: A low-cost thermal imager based on the FLIR Lepton sensor
#27It's pretty cool. But note that from an end-user perspective you're getting a Flir Lepton 3.5 thermal camera for $522.99. A Flir TG165-X does mostly the same stuff for a much lower price (and half the horizontal and vertical resolution due to the lower end lepton). But the TG doesn't allow you to hack it, and this project does.
A Flir ONE (2nd Gen) does almost the same, for about half the price. But again, not as hackable.
So while a bunch of people here might suggest that the price is very high, or the capabilities can easily be matched, it's a bit of a mixed bag. If you just want to see some thermal images, and you already have a smartphone, a Flir ONE might be for you. If you need a dedicated ruggedised hand-held cameras, get one of the ones from Flir. Anything beyond that is probably either too expensive or not as easy to integrate with what you need, and that's where this DIY comes in; easy to do whatever you want to, and good enough to outperform whatever else is on the market, but it will still cost money.
Edit: There is a PURETHERMAL-M which apparently is a USB interface board for the lepton module, so if someone wanted to hack around with a slightly less useful kit, but for a lower price, that's an option too. It does require a host system to control it, so it's not like you can use it as a 'handheld' like this DIY project.
Re: DIY-Thermocam: A low-cost thermal imager based on the FLIR Lepton sensor
#28Awesome project. But $300 is still quite steep for a thing I might maybe use once a year. I really wish these thermal sensors came down in price...
The sensor itself is 160. There is no getting around that.
you could make your own thermal sensor, which is what i thought the article was going to be about from the title
this is a bit like 'i made a working, drivable car from scratch using only basic hand tools, raw materials, and a 2005 honda civic' or 'i built my own operating system around the linux kernel'
Re: DIY-Thermocam: A low-cost thermal imager based on the FLIR Lepton sensor
#29The DIY-Thermocam V3 is a low-cost, do-it-yourself thermal imager, based on the popular radiometric FLIR Lepton sensor and an open-source ecosystem. It gives private persons, educational institutes and companies access to a portable, affordable and customizable thermal imaging platform that is based on open-source software and hardware. It is constructed as a self-assembly solution, that can be build at home by only…
Your parts list is missing the actual Lepton imager, https://www.diy-thermocam.net/docs/partlist/ I know it is on the other group gets page. I was not able to find the BOM in the GH repo. This would be a useful addition.
It looks like in an earlier version you had a visible camera as well, what was the choice in removing it?
I take it the device does not present itself as a web cam?
Re: DIY-Thermocam: A low-cost thermal imager based on the FLIR Lepton sensor
#30Can you make a slightly crappier version with a much cheaper visible spectrum sensor? I don't know much (obviously) about how they work, but intuitively it would seem a bit weird to me if they just happened to be restricted to exactly the same part of the spectrum as our eyes as a hardware limitation. Can you ignore data about visible red and higher in firmware, and get a thermal image that's obviously not as good as…
If you remove the infrared blocking filter (hot mirror) from many digital cameras, they can see very shortwave near infra red. Forward looking infrared (FLIR)[0] cameras detect long wave infrared, which is what you need for a "thermal" camera. [0] quite what is "forward looking" about them I don't know
I think the company originally
made forward looking infrared sensors for military aircraft.
The name’s just stuck around since.