I wanted to challenge the long range shooting communities to the idea of making their own smart devices to help advance the hobby. I had brainstormed for a while hoping to build up a thermal scope that would be much more affordable than the standard consumer scopes and seemed to take a distracted turn towards making a full smart rifle scope platform. The future expandability can easily support a thermal camera in the future,  and as I take a small break from this project I wanted to share with the hacker communities what I had accomplished so far! 

Some stats of the performance for ya:  using a Raspberry Pi 4 I have achieved a standard frame rate of 36 fps for the output feed to the TFT display, with the ballistics solutions updated around 16 FPS behind the scenes on a separate thread.  For the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, about 24 fps and 14 fps for the ballistics (NOT BAD!!).  I feel this can easily be sped up in the future with a full sweep rewrite in  C (since this is running in Python at the moment) or by using a different frame editing library for speed ups.  

This build uses a 9 DOF IMU unit to feed tilt angles, gyro rates and magnetometer heading to the main ballistics algorithm for accurate results. Usually a handheld ballistics computer can run about $650.00 so being able to do this for under $200 with a video feed already is hilariously exciting.   Alot of my motivation for projects comes from showing that consumer products are over priced.... I decided to use two rotary encoders for inputs to simulate the Elevation and Windage adjustment turrets of a real rifle scope. They work nice and even click with inputs.   Additional buttons were added for more functionality, I am considering even more buttons for the forward shooting hand position for fast input. 

Let me know what you think, and if I should continue to the next stage with this, a compact and shockproof housing design!  

Thanks, 

Jack