Having a hard time seeing the circuit? Click on the image for a closer look. You should be presented with the following screen as shown below. Luckily, Raspbian makes this easy to do by including a utility called raspi-config. Our first matter of business will be enabling the Pi’s SPI and I2C interfaces. Boot it up, and open the Terminal program. In fact, what are we waiting for? Let me give you the tour…Īs I mentioned earlier, you’ll want to have the Raspbian OS installed on your Raspberry Pi. Imagine using something like OpenCV to track, not just color centroids, but heat centroids! That’s right, you could be building heat-seeking robots right in your own home! When it comes to robotics, thermal cameras are especially useful heat detectors because the image that they produce (by virtue of being, well, an image) can be processed using the same techniques and software as visible light images. 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. 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.

Flir thermal camera raspberry pi