Pi Thermal Camera – Forumite.site

This topic has 4 replies, 4 voices, and was last updated 7 years, 2 months ago by Ed P.

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December 21, 2018 at 5:18 pm #29399
Ed P
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@edps
Forumite Points: 39
I thought I’d give a little pre-Christmas update on my purchase of the bits for a Pi thermal camera.

This is in the nature of a holding post, as I am waiting for the bits to make a short, flexible HDMI cable. To my surprise this has been the most difficult part of making a portable camera.

Just for the record, the bits I will be using are:

Pi ZeroW, (I did not actually use the presoldered one, and saved a few pounds)

a 3.5inch hdmi screen,

Thermal camera breakout

Pi Powerpack (you will of course get a zillion very appropriate warnings of the dangers of soft lithium battery packs – so some care needed)

some odds and ends of connectors to make a removable camera fitting into the pi.

When fully assembled, I’ll package it up in a black foam board chassis. (times when I wish I had a 3D printer!).

Due to Christmas and arrival of g’children it will probably be a few weeks until my next update.

The Pic shows roughly where I’m at today, but I can still go ahead and install software for a ‘static’ setup
December 21, 2018 at 8:27 pm #29401
PlaneMan
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@planeman
Forumite Points: 196
Looks interesting Ed.

I look forward to the next instalment.
December 21, 2018 at 8:37 pm #29403
Dave Rice
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@ricedg
Forumite Points: 7
Me too.
December 21, 2018 at 11:37 pm #29408
Tippon
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@tippon
Forumite Points: 0
Me three 🙂
December 22, 2018 at 7:17 pm #29419
Ed P
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@edps
Forumite Points: 39
Today was a day for software installation. I’ll say a little more about that in my next post as there were more than two or three gotchas/poor documentation to work through. However in the end I compiled and installed all the required software.

First point to make is that the pi zero does not appear to have enough horsepower to do the job, reports say that the FIR chip imposes a significant workload on the CPU. The other thing I found (and it may be related) is that the software barfed at resolutions above 640×480. (It may be that a low res OLED screen breakout may solve this and the CPU issue, but I’m not going there at this stage.

I am therefore going to cut my losses for the time being and use a Raspi3B and see how that goes. Course I’ll never know if in fact the zero issues were a compile/install problem, but I do not think that is the case.

More around next weekend. (too many family interruptions in the offing)

I hope that everyone has a great Christmas, Mithras day, Saturnalia, or simple Feast of Excesses – whatever floats your boat!
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