Lepton Range (Distance) and availability

[Leon de Beer]

Hey all,

I would appreciate some input here.

I'm looking at using the Lepton in a security surveillance application and have a few burning questions I can't find answers to elsewhere please.

1. What distance can I expect to sense a human at?

2. Ditto, but for vehicle?

3. What's the best host to interface it to (Beaglebone Black / Pi / etc).

    [I don't (necessarily) want a constant video stream, I want to know when a person or vehicle passes a point, and take a photo stored to memory.]  

and, very importantly ...

3. Where can I buy some units from urgently to do some tests on? I've tried a few sources with no reply from any!

 

Thanks in advance, appreciate.

[Dale jason]

Unfortunately that is actually a tough question.  Sensing anything warmer than the surroundings is much easier than sensing a specific type of object by its shape.  So it depends on the algorithms you plan to use to detect a human is present and how many pixels the object needs to cover before the algorithm triggers.  If you are sure only humans or cars will be in the field of view (probably a poor assumption) then that only requires one or two pixels to become hotter than the background image but you probably need a few more just to help average out the noise.

Dale

[sa...@pureengineering.com]

Dale has a good answer about distance. 

1 In general the distance is perhaps 100 feet depending on a number of factors. 

2 a car perhaps a bit more. 

3 There is no best host. it depends on your application and what you are most familiar with using. personally I like low power, so I use something like the stm32f4 series, but the pi is a popular chose although it has a startup issue with how the gpio is sequenced. 

3b. I of course recommend getting units here: http://www.pureengineering.com/store for the quickest shipment. if you have time I would get them at groupgets.com