It’s Getting Hot in Here

Looking at the world through a different lens to imagine how other living creatures experience their environment is a thought-provoking exercise. What do animals see when they peer through their alien eyes that perceive wavelengths of radiation outside of what we consider to be the visible spectrum? What does the world look like when it is bathed in ultraviolet light, or when wafting plumes of heat can be seen with the naked eye? We will probably never fully understand that experience, but we can at least get a pretty good idea with the help of modern technology.

An electrical engineer by the name of Dan Julio has a passion for building high-precision thermal cameras that offer a new way to experience what is right in front of our eyes. Julio’s latest creation is a pair of long-wave infrared cameras that translate heat into visible light to reveal it to us. One of the cameras, the iCam, is an all-in-one solution with a built-in display. The other, the iCamMini, is more compact and an external device, like a smartphone, is required to view the images it captures.

Both cameras are powered by an Espressif ESP32 microcontroller and a Tiny1C thermal imaging module with 256x192 pixel resolution. A custom breakout board was designed to provide power to the thermal imaging sensor, and also to expose its SPI and I2C interfaces. Optional distance, temperature, and humidity sensors can be used to correct for ambient conditions to increase the thermal measurement accuracy.

The iCam has a 3.5" 480x320 pixel touchscreen with a GUI interface so that it can serve as a fully self-contained camera. The iCamMini, on the other hand, makes a WiFi connection to a secondary device that then views its imaging via a web browser-based app. A Micro SD card socket enables saving of images, and a rechargeable 3.7V LiPo battery allows the cameras to operate on the go.

The iCam version was designed to make exploring the world around us as simple as possible, while the iCamMini is meant for applications where size constraints are critical, as is the case with a drone-mounted camera. The iCamMini version can also be used for monitoring the activity of a room, where output at the point of the sensor itself is unnecessary.

Julio’s thermal cameras are still at the prototype stage and are not perfectly polished just yet. It does look like a nice platform for experimenting with these technologies, however, so it might be a good starting point for a project of your own. Circuit diagrams, device images, and lots of helpful tips are available to help you get off to a running start.