Published March 6, 2020

Recon and Rescue

The drone uses an IR thermal sensor to detect heat signatures in real-time and report back to the operator or support team.

IntermediateFull instructions provided24 hours1,045

Bonus Prizes

HoverGames Challenge 1: Fight Fire with Flyers

Things used in this project

Hardware components

Adafruit AMG8833 IR Thermal Camera Breakout

Raspberry Pi 3 Model B

NXP KIT-HGDRONEK66

NXP RDDRONE-FMUK66

Story

Our project is about identifying lines of fire, people in distress, and escape routes. We built a drone that can detect heat signatures and report back remotely to allow for support, rescue, and escape. Our solution focuses on ease of use which is a differentiator. It could save lives and time. We mounted an IR thermal camera to the Hovergames drone to detect sources of heat at specific locations and transmit the information in real-time through a webpage back to the operator or support team.

We envision the next steps for this project is to create a map of the area in real-time showing the heat signatures for the area. As well as further studies of performance during longer flights and higher altitudes.

Code

Contributor content that was used and modified

We used this code written by authors in the link below with the modifications/comments below to read the AMG8833 IR heat sensor and display it on a webpage. We found that the python script, IR_Sensor.py, returned errors with the Adafruit 8833 so we ended up using the rpi_thermal_cam.py and modifying it to create the pixels.csv file. In order to create the data file in the HTML folder we had to run these commands - 1. cd /var/www 2. sudo chown pi: html We also found that the rc.local did not make the python script start on boot up so we ended up just starting the python script with a keyboard, mouse, and monitor connected and then disconnecting them before the flight. We did see however that sometimes the script would stop working unexpectedly and we have to reconnect the perpherials and start again.