GRID-EYE BLE-capable thermal camera

Hi, I'd like to thank everyone for their kind support and thoughtful comments - what an excellent community!

This will probably be the last project log for this one. I wasn't able to get enough time before the Prize deadline to make my Android app work (I am really, really bad at Android!), and to be honest, I didn't have much more in store for this project beyond an app that would let you save images.

I'd still love to see someone try to make one, or make a better one, and will try to respond quickly to any questions posted here.

I love the format of hackaday.io, so I will be putting subsequent projects up here, contest or not!

Thanks again,

AKA

This project is based, conceptually, on the excellent IR-Blue Kickstarter from a few years ago (although it uses none of the same code).

I had thought I remembered all Adafruit code being MIT-licensed, but upon checking I seem to be wrong. I'm using a version of Adafruit's SSD1306 driver library that I modified for the RFDuino's ARM architecture...you can find a link to the modified library in the "External links" part of the project page.

The only other code that I think might be worth citing is the demo Arduino code that is included in the Grid-Eye datasheet from Panasonic - I couldn't find a license on that code, and I don't think I'm copying it linearly, more just using it as a reference.

I'm always anxious about attribution because I don't want to offend of slight anyone - all the electronics and code that I am able to do is only by virtue of many, many others sharing their work, so I'm hoping to participate in kind.

I just wanted to make a remark about the scope of this project: I'm trying to keep it quite simple for a number of reasons.

One reason is that I'd like other people to be able to make it - I've used and benefited from a lot of open source hardware and software in the past, and I'd like to try in earnest to give back to the communities that share their work. Making a project with a small component count and a really simple premise seems like the best way to make a project "buildable" for lots of people.

I'm also not a professional electrical engineer (electronics are a part of my job, but I"m more of an informed faker), so lots of parts of this project were very new to me, including the SMD soldering, i2c implementation, and board fabrication. Avoiding things like a power-management IC that would allow for LiPo charging made this project way more approachable than a fully-engineered kickstarter-ready product.

So anyways, if you were wondering about a menu function, or an on/off switch, or a battery-recharging circuit, or a threshold/alarm mode, the answer is that those are great ideas not implemented here - but you should try them yourself!

...some people expressed interest in playing around with the GRID-EYE sensor, so I added the breakout board I designed to this project's Github repo. You can find it here:
https://github.com/AKAMEDIASYSTEM/grideye_rfduino/tree/master/grid-eye_eagle/grideye_breakout

Just a quick note that the next step in this project is to make an Android app that receives each frame and displays it / saves it / streams it / etc. I'll have a longer post soon in which I work out a feasible featureset for the first version of the app.

I also realized that I positioned the RFD22301 unit on the board in a way that might diminish longer-range RF performance, although in experience so far I've had no trouble connecting with a nearby Android. If time allows, I'll make another version of the board with on/off switch, a repositioned RFD22301, and (possibly) a charging circuit.