Sunday, November 23, 2014

Flir Lepton Thermal Imaging Sensor + Gameduino 2

I recently got my hands on a pair of Flir Lepton thermal imaging sensors and have spent the last week bringing them online in my spare time. These are absolutely incredible devices that I believe will pave the way to consumer devices incorporating thermal imaging cameras. The footprint of the camera module (and optical assembly) is about the size of a dime. The resolution is 80x60 at 14bpp which is remarkable despite sounding low.

Thermal Andrew :]
I have successfully implemented a driver for the Lepton module and displayed frames on an LCD. This is all running on an STM32F4 processor on a Nucleo board. Attached to it is a Gameduino 2 which incorporates the FT800 graphics processor. I have implemented my own colorization and min/max scaling before uploading the frames to the GPU.

Front System Overview
I have used some simple jumper wires to interface with this camera. This setup is running at 21MHz with no issues. I am using a breakout board provided by Pure Engineering. You can pick up one from Tindie if you are interested. The Lepton module can be ripped out the Flir One iPhone accessory for now.

Rear System Overview and Second Camera (future project ;])
I wrote my own driver for the Lepton core and the FT800 graphics processor. Continue reading for more details!