“tCam is an easy-to-assemble, full-feature thermal imagine camera with touchscreen and Wifi for use with desktop computers and mobile phones.
Story
tCam has the following features
- Flir Lepton 3.5 radiometric thermal imaging sensor
- 480x320 pixel capacitive touch display
- Local Micro-SD card storage for images and videos
- Wifi interface for remote access and control
- LiPo battery for portable operation
- Fully open-source
It’s supported by a desktop application that runs on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows, Android and iOS apps and a python driver for custom applications.
Like many projects we makers embark upon, tCam came about for many reasons. I always wanted my own thermal imaging camera simply because they are very cool. I wanted to monitor circuit boards I designed as they heated up remotely from my desktop computer. I thought it might be useful for others if the camera makes the raw radiometric data easily available for non-traditional applications such as analysis using machine learning systems. And finally I thought the challenges involved in making a comprehensive system including supporting software would be both fun and educational. Of course it ended up being a lot more work than I initially envisioned.
During the process of developing tCam I ended up splitting the problem into two pieces, partly because of the complexity and partly because a single ESP32 could not manage all the things the camera had to do in real time. I first designed a camera called tCam-Mini that provided remote access to images taken by a Flir Lepton 3.5. With that camera I created a remote access protocol and supporting software to view and record data from the camera. Then I combined work on another project - a general purpose ESP32 development board called gCore - with tCam-Mini to create tCam. I documented my travails in a hackady.io project if you’re interested in more details.”