woo3937/ircamera

For a cheap single pixel infrared camera.

This is a single pixel infa-red camera. Normally, IR cameras are in the range 4,000 -- 40,000 dollars. This camera costs ~400 dollars, and takes a not long (unknown) time to capture an image. Examples will be shown on this page at a later date.

This project is based off the instructions at cheap-thermocam.tk. These instructions aren't very good, and many of the links are dead. Since I find that frustrating, some better instructions are below.

Raspberry Pi Project

I started off with the Arduino, but it didn't even make enough RAM to hold the entire image. I moved to the RPi, which has 250,000x the RAM. I also moved to more accurate motors, as the servos were horribly inaccurate.

The parts list for this project:

Part	Number	Total Price
RPi	1	35
IR sensor	1	35
Driver boards	2	200
Stepper motors	2	70
Total		340

Also, the comments in the project on the RPi (temp.rpi/IRcamera) are wonderfully accurate and complete. I hate bad documentation, and am trying to write good docs.

Pysical Directions

1. Look at the comments at the top of IRcamera.c (in temp.rpi/IRcamera as of 2013-7-24) to determine where to wire SDA/SCK/Vdd/GND, and where those pins are on the IR sensor.
2. Make a motor controller that allows the motor to rotate in two dimensions. I had our department's machine shop make ours. On the final camera, the sensor will go on the disk on the upper motor.

Ardino Project

To run a cheap version of the thermocam, use (possibly with some modification) IRcamera.ino in the main folder. For parts, get

• IR Sensor
• Arduino Uno R3
• SD card and SD card shield
• Pan tilt brackets
• Servos
• breadboard, wires, superglue, etc (you probably have it already)

This Arduino writes images to the SD card in the simplest RGB format available (PPM). To do that, you'll need a good PPM viewer. For the Mac, look at Xee (I downloaded it from here, and I didn't get a license).

Physical Directions

1. Look in the comments of IRcamera.ino for the directions.

Bugs

I'm writing down all the painfully hard to resolve bugs I find so I don't have to go through the whole process of figuring it out again.

RPi and Internet

I could SSH into the RPi simply by joining the University's network (the unprotected one) and sharing my internet via a USB-ethernet cable I bought.