Tindie is a great place to find uncommon electronic components or weird/interesting boards. [Xose Pérez] periodically “stroll the isles” of Tindie to keep up on cool new components, and when he saw Panasonic’s Grid_EYE AMG88 infrared sensor, [Xose] knew that he had to build something with it. The awesome find is an 8×8 IR array sensor on a breakout board… the hack is all in what you do with it.
Already taken by “LED fever,” [Xose’s] mind immediately fixated on an 8×8 IR array with an 8×8 LED matrix display. With a vision, [Xose] threw together an IR sensor matrix, a LED matrix, a small microcontroller, a Li-Ion battery, a charger, and a step-up to power the LEDs. What did he end up with? A bulky but nice camera that looks fantastic.
While commercially available IR Cameras have thousands of pixels and can overlay a normal image over an IR image among other fancy stuff, they are sometimes prohibitively expensive and, to quote [Xose], “waaaaaay less fun to build”. Like any engineer, [Xose] still has ideas for how to improve his open source camera. From more color patterns to real time recording, [Xose] is only limited by the memory of his microcontroller.
Moreover, [Xose’s] camera is inspired by the Pibow cases made by Pimoroni and this is only one project in a series that uses a stack of laser cut pieces of MDF and acrylic for the project enclosure. What’s not to love: short fabrication times and a stunning result. Want more project enclosures? We’ve got plenty.
“While commercially available IR Cameras have thousands of pixels and can overlay a normal image over an IR image among other fancy stuff, they are sometimes prohibitively expensive…”
FLIR one is about $300 so I guess “expensive” is pretty relative.
A Grideye is like $22 in qty 1 from Digikey. It’s a pretty cool sensor.
FLI|R Óne is obviously not referenced when someone says ‘thousands of pixels’
P.S. No idea why the text is warped, I wrote it normal and it showed normal in the editbox.
I’ve done some evaluation work of these in the lab for use as industrial sensors – if you’re not interested in photo-level resolution (or close-up work) the GridEye is pretty good, quick response (it’s a thermopile device rather than bolometer), and fairly simple to interface if you get the breakout board kit from Digi-Key (~$50) total. We had a strange problem with it sending extra bits but were able to deal with it in software – may have been PEBCAK.
For some applications a few grid-eyes can still be very useful. e.g. with a series of lenses with fields of view such that their is a diminishing field of view with each eye covering 25% of the next widest view and the entire set being on a movable head you can still detect motion over a wide area and then located the object precisely. With 4 eyes it is maybe equivalent in precision to a fixed 512 x 512 grid, possibly more as with micro sweeping you may be able to get sub-pixel accuracy on the camera with the narrowest view, a megapixel IR detector, but no longer a normal camera.
Or a saccadic camera which mounts the entire sensor in a magnetic sling and physically moves it around behind the lens. With some position sensing and feedback, you can vibrate the sensor around and collect as much resolution as you want.
That is another way, and there is the single sensor and coded aperture mask method too where the image is reconstructed mathematically.