• Download Raspbian Stretch Lite
• Write image onto SD card using Win32DiskImager
• Setup SSH and Wi-Fi see here

Once it boots, connect via SSH and execute commands to update software.  Also to save power, if you're going headless you can turn off the HDMI.  This is the only non-thermal imaging or image processing related power hack here.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

/usr/bin/tvservice -o

Run the following commands to install prerequisites:

sudo apt-get install libusb-1.0-0-dev cmake
sudo apt-get install python-opencv
sudo apt-get install git

git clone https://github.com/groupgets/libuvc.git
git clone https://github.com/groupgets/purethermal1-uvc-capture.git
git clone https://github.com/disasterarchy/thermalZero.git

 The purethermal1-uvc-capture git is foundational and is added only for reference here.  I will be using a customized slimmed version in my thermalZero git.

You will need to build libuvc.  Also see the libuvc readme for more info.

cd libuvc
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make && sudo make install

 Afterwards I find that my python scripts don't automatically find the libuvc.  Because of this I next copy libuvc.so to the folder where my python scripts are.

Run the program by executing:

sudo python string_out.py

This will run the program.  The program outputs all the temperatures to the console once every ten seconds.  Here is a summary of my results with a Lepton 3.5:

To change how often it captures an image, open up leanuvc.py and find the line time.sleep(10) and change it to reflect the time in seconds you want to wait between captures.