Pi Zero W, Lepton 3.5 and 1.4 breakout board

[Sara Stafford]

Hi,

I'm new to this hardware and software and I've been having trouble setting up the Lepton module and getting any pictures (or video, but photos is mainly what I want for my project).  I've tried every tutorial I could find (starting with the FLIR Maker site, also the Sparkfun tutorial, dug through this forum also, everything on Github...) and still haven't been able to get images.  Currently I'm stuck on the red square of death, and none of the suggestions for this I've found has worked.  The shutter periodically clicks shut, though.  

Is there any updated tutorial out there that walks you through each step of setting up a simple camera with the Lepton 3.5 and a Pi? 

[Sara Stafford]

Update:  I switched to a Pi 3 B and did finally get still images and very glitchy video that I continue to troubleshoot (horizontal lines through video, and constant freezing).  Does the Pi Zero just not have enough processing power for this?  I'd love to find someone that has successfully found a way to work with the zero as small size/weight is important for my application.

[Peter Jansen]

There does appear to be an older example of using the Pi Zero and the SPI breakout board (not the Purethermal) to work here: https://www.hackster.io/groupgets/pylepton-zero-5da8a0

Specific to the PureThermal, I asked a similar question about 15 months ago (about trying to get the ratiometric code to work on the Pi Zero), and spent quite a bit of effort digging into the guts of the library and driver to try and get things to work.  I wasn't able to find help on the issue in this group, and I haven't seen either a successful demonstration in the open source community, or here -- and figuring out the issues and showing such a demonstration doesn't appear to be a priority for the development team, which unfortunately leaves a hole in the thermal-camera-for-small-portable-applications projects.  I would still love to see such a demonstration and tutorial. 

One of the issues might be that the Pi Zero is very underpowered, and the latest versions of Raspbian run very slowly on it, so even getting a debugging environment to figure out the issues is currently very clunky and not a fast process.

[Sara Stafford]

Thanks,

I did see the pyleton zero page.  So far the pylepton code is the only thing that has worked fairly consistently for me.  LeptonModule (even the versions that are meant for Lepton 3) has only given me red squares and images with horizontal bars. 

I did find this https://github.com/ArathornII/ThermalDrone and attempted to follow their process installing everything however I had the same issues ultimately.  It seems they also decided the zero did not quite have the processing power to do the job. 

I have ordered a PureThermal 2 board and hope that gets me up and running.  I would still like to continue to try and find a setup that works with the old breakout board and the Zero.  It seems it may be possible but that might be beyond my skill level at this time with the programming involved. 

Sara

[whuml...@gmail.com]

Hi Sara, how is your project going? I also want to make a light weight thermal camera that can wirelessly transmit thermal images to the local computer. But I am new to this, do you have some update to your project or suggestions?

Many thanks.

Best, 

Leyuan