tCam-Mini - An ESP32-based wireless thermal imaging camera

[globoy]

Hey all,

I designed a simple, Flir Lepton3.5 based, radiometric thermal imaging camera called tCam-Mini.  It's designed to make it easy to get radiometric (absolute temperature) data from the sensor for use in all kinds of thermographic analysis.  Communication with the camera occurs over a Wifi network socket interface and data is easy-to-parse json formatted packets.  It can be powered by a USB charger or other 5V PSU.

Group gets is running a campaign for the camera at https://groupgets.com/campaigns/919-tcam-mini.  They will build and ship boards if it succeeds.

Although the goal of this camera is to make it easy to access the data from the Lepton sensor for your own application, I also wrote a desktop application that runs on Linux, OS X and Windows to control the camera, view images (static or streaming), save and read them from files and plot temperature data over time.  Super useful if you want to do things like watch parts heat up on a circuit board.

There will also be a python library wrapping the network connection to the camera and providing a simple API to control the camera and get images from it.  For fun I'm also writing a web server for the Raspberry Pi that can connect with multiple cameras and provides some very simple detection logic to record images when a part of the image goes above or below a preset temperature (I want to use this for wildlife detection).

The camera is open-source and you can also build one yourself out of commonly available development boards.  Details for the camera can be found at my github repository: https://github.com/danjulio/lepton/tree/master/ESP32 including the desktop application and some sample image and video files to play with.

- Dan (aka globoy)

[PlainName]

Nice job 

[globoy]

Thank you.

[globoy]

I wrote a simple web server application for tCam-Mini and posted that to https://github.com/danjulio/lepton/tree/master/ESP32/WebApp.  It can connect to multiple cameras and provides a web interface.  It can also do some simple event detection, recording images to files when a certain population of pixels in a scene fit in a temperature range.

A python library for accessing the camera should also be complete in the next couple of weeks.