FLIR Lepton Thermal Camera with Raspberry Pi

FLIR’s new Lepton camera is a revolution for the hobby market and DIYers.
It’s cheap (less than $200),
Simple (SPI and I2C only),
And it still has enough resolution for daily applications (80×60 pixels).

I bought my FLIR module and breakout board from SparkFun. SparkFun’s price is high (~$350), but acceptable for fast shipping.

First, I tested it with an Arduino, but bad news: Arduino boards don’t have enough RAM for the image data.
You need 9600 bytes for each frame, and the I2C and SPI speeds are also limited.

Then I tried my Raspberry Pi board.
The sample application is well designed and works flawlessly under the X Window interface.

Adding new features is much easier than with microcontroller-based solutions.

I’m going to design an analogue thermal camera for drones with the FLIR Lepton module,
so I need a small, plug-and-play solution.
These days I’m working with the Raspberry Pi Compute Module, but next I will test an FPGA solution for the Lepton.
An FPGA-based design is fast, needs no boot time and is really small.

Thanks for reading
Melih