The stated symptom was that it just didn’t power on at all, which I guessed might be down to a power/battery fault and hoped it wouldn’t affect the actual sensor module itself. They are commercially available as components from electronics distributors such as Digi-Key, but I found that to be an expensive and difficult way to obtain them (the availability at the time I was trying to buy one was rather poor).Īfter watching a bunch of thermal camera-related Mike’s Electric Stuff videos on YouTube, I discovered that a good source of these might be the the small, smartphone-compatible thermal camera devices such as FLIR’s One and Seek Thermal’s Compact range.Ī few clicks later and I found a broken FLIR One Gen. This is also the expensive, difficult-to-source bit. This is the business-end of a thermal camera. I started off trying to find a microbolometer. Feel free to ask questions down in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer! 1 I wanted to get started with thermography without a huge price tag, so I thought I’d go all in and build my own! Obviously, this was a hugely involved process so I’ll cover a bit of each aspect here. Unfortunately, they’re also quite expensive, especially if you’re buying one just for playing around with rather than using in some commercial capacity like thermal surveying or electronics testing. I think the ability to view a part of the electromagnetic spectrum that is normally hidden from us will always be a strange and exciting thing. Thermal cameras have always fascinated me. - Tarjima Qilingan Maqola (🇺🇿 Uzbek).Thank you also to readers who have offered to write translations of the post - I’ll post the links here as people send them.

The comments section below now contains quite a bit of information from readers building their own thermal camera based on this post. Thank you to everyone for the fantastic responses to this post.

Flir lepton 3.5 raspberry pi