The technique is based on the use of proper imaging systems for the acquisition of the thermal radiation that every body at a given temperature emits from this radiation, knowing the thermal emissivity, it is possible to calculate the temperature of the body.

Infrared (IR) thermography is an important nondestructive technique with applications in different fields, ranging from engineering to industry, from bio-medicine to emergency relief, up to heritage conservation, as extensively reviewed in, ,. The thermal endoscope was designed with dimensions also compatible for robotic-assisted/traditional minimally-invasive surgery. In general, the device enables to perform thermography in applications in which traditional larger equipment cannot be employed, as nondestructive diagnostics in confined space in the engineering field. The Infrared Vision Software is provided for controlling the acquisition of thermal frames, and for the thermographic calculation of the object temperature from the input parameters on object surface emissivity and environment. The thermal endoscope unit is controlled by a Raspberry external unit. Two PCBs were developed for assembling the endoscope in two different schemes, to enable frontal or lateral thermal vision setup. The sensor and the PCB can be inserted into a cylindrical protective case of diameter down to 15mm, inox tube or plastic, 3D printable envelope, with an optical window in Germanium. It users the linux remoteproc facility and requires only a few percent of main CPU time to keep a full 9 fps display running.The implementation of a thermal endoscope based on the LWIR camera cores Lepton and a custom miniaturized electronics is reported. The video pipeline running on the PRUs is the most interesting contribution. My code and designs can be found on github. I documented my experience on hackaday.io. I was successful and built my own camera that remains a work in progress. That interested me in using the PRUs inside a Beaglebone Black and later a Pocketbeagle to create a video pipeline to offload the real-time chore from the main CPU. I played with the Raspberry Pi and found it difficult for a user-space process to reliably keep synced to the camera. I started with a Teensy 3.2 based camera and was able to get an about 4 frames per second using a single SPI bus for both the camera and display. Over the course of a couple of years I made several different cameras as I learned how to reliability get data from the module. After borrowing a friend's unit repeatedly, I decided to design my own, aided by the availability of the FLiR Lepton 3.5 from. I occasionally have use for one to monitor heat generation in something I've designed, and they are useful for myriad of other applications as well. Like a lot of people I always wanted a thermal imaging camera.

Lepton camera raspberry pi