Quite some time ago I stumbled over the Panasonic "Grid-Eye" AMG88 family of infrared sensor arrays. They only have 8x8 pixels, but in comparison to Flir Lepton sensors, they are relatively cheap (~25€ including VAT) and easy to get (RS).
So I ordered one, created a small breakout board and while I was at it, used the opportunity to create a mini IR cam by adding a cheap Chinese "65k" OLED module (~6€).
Since I was playing around with the LPC824 for another project, I used it as a chance to test (and bugfix) my SPI library. The LPC824 (32k ROM, 8k RAM) is running from a (trimmed) internal RC oscillator at 12MHz. Communication with the AMG88 is I2C and pretty straight forward.
The temperature data is 12bit signed and the maximum frame frequency is 10Hz (actually there is only a 1Hz and 10Hz mode). So the LPC824 collects the data every 100ms, converts it to an IR false color palette, scales it up to 64x64 pixels and sends it with a four line SPI (CLK, MOSI, CS, C/D) to the OLED (96x64 pixels). Luckily I could use the HW SPI CS feature of the LPC824 in combination with DMA, so even though the data needs to be sent in 8bit frames (one CS per 8bit), I can send one full scaled up line (64x8 16bit pixels) with one DMA transfer.
The whole setup needs ~60mA.
All files related to this project can be found in the BitBucket
repository
https://bitbucket.org/fade0ff/grideye
This is a spare time project I did without any commercial interest.
Everything is released under the Creative
Commons CC-BY license.
In a nutshell this means that you can do share, modify and use
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You just need to give me appropriate credit, indicate what changes you
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See the CC BY license for details.