This DIY thermal camera is built around a Raspberry Pi and a $60 camera module
Mar 25, 2021
John Aldred
John Aldred is a photographer with over 25 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter – and occasional beta tester – of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.
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The Raspberry Pi is a wonderful thing, and we’ve seen many cool photography and video projects based around it. But thanks to the MLX90640 thermal camera module, you can turn the Pi into a fully-fledged thermal camera of your own with software you can customise to your own needs. And that’s exactly what Tom Shaffner did.
He built a thermal camera using this module and a Raspberry Pi and even wrote his own software for it. Fortunately, Tom made the software completely open-source and posted the code up to GitHub so you can have a go at making your own and even tailor the software to your own needs.
With a total price of a little over $100, it might seem a little much compared to some DIY projects, but it’s still vastly less expensive than going out and buying a commercial thermal camera – which range from several hundred to several thousand dollars. The resolution of this module isn’t extremely high, coming in at only 24 x 32 pixels, but the resolution of thermal cameras is rarely very high, often overlaying the image on top of a visible light shot to indicate the detail. But with some interpolation, you see all the detail you typically need to.
The camera module itself costs around $60 (when it’s in stock), and with something like a Pi 3B+, a small microSD card and a power source, that brings you right around $100 (or a hair more). And if you’ve already got an old Pi lying around doing nothing, now you can give it a purpose in life! You can also splurge and go with a Raspberry Pi 4 if you wish, offering more processing power and RAM to speed things up and offer your system more capability over the Pi 3B+ but Tom says it should run fine on even a Pi 3 with a little adjustment (of course, no 5Ghz WiFi on the Pi 3).
A very cool project. Makes me wish I had a real need for a thermal imaging camera!
All of the documentation for building your own, installing the software and getting it all running is on Tom’s Github (code here). He also has a bunch of pictures and animations there showing the kinds of results you can get with it.
[via Raspberry Pi]
John Aldred
John Aldred is a photographer with over 25 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter – and occasional beta tester – of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.
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5 responses to “This DIY thermal camera is built around a Raspberry Pi and a $60 camera module”
Before anyone gets exited, the camera resolution is 32×24 pixels. That’s not very useful.
Shachar Weis Yes, I did actually mention the resolution in the article… Most thermal imaging cameras are much lower resolution than the optical cameras. Useful is relative. :)
32×24 is still low compared with a FLIR One (80×60) or Seek (206×156) smartphone attached camera. This is cheaper, and it’s not useless, but it is low. (Both FLIR and Seek also have “Pro” models that are higher resolution and more expensive.)
Shachar Weis Plenty to find leaks in a renovation :D
Very useful for most less artistic use for thermal camera.