0. Outline

The idea itself is copied from this project:

Raspberry Pi Thermal Imaging | Hackaday.io

My own predecessor project can be found here:

Infrared Home Intrusion System | Hackaday.io

1. Prototype

Not really much to tell, you can see how it works in the video hopefully. 

It is not finished yet, and the display of colors certainly requires fine tuning (smoothing out the color transitions, for instance). 

2. Hardware components

Beside the IR-array and the Microcontroller board that controls it (Raspberry Pi Pico W), I am using a Raspberry Pi 5 and the Raspberry Pi Camera Rev 1.3.

It is of course a challenge to map the 24x32(=768 FIR) pixels/sensors to the 300x400 camera pixels because the angle of vision of either component does not match.

3. Program development

I've relied solely on the picamera2 github resources (see link, mostly the "overlay" examples), so everything is programed in Python. 

Notwithstanding, my code is nothing but a quick&dirty construct and presently it is too embarrassing to share it (I've got barely any experience with Python), but I hope I can soon upload the scripts to github as well.

4. Improvements

As usual, you can improve all sorts of things, such as making the color transitions smoother, as said, or speeding things up in general. So this page will be updated soon.