WiFi doesn't like obstacles, and when we fly a drone, we can meet a lot of these. Since we had no big resolution to send, analog transmission seemed for us to be the less constraining solution.

Instead, the display buffer from the Thermocam is transferred as whole, using a serial connection at 115200 bauds, what increases the refresh rate.Ī python script running on top of the Linux operating system receives the data from the camera and creates a thermal image stream with a resolution of 640x480 pixels, from the buffer who is at 320x240 pixels, made possible by the pygame ' () ' function, that uses a method based on bilinear and averaging code. The thermal image is not rendered on the Pi Zero itself. Since we had little time, and we wanted to prevent any changes, we wanted to go with the RPI0w.īut why would we use a raspberry Pi as we already have a Teensy ?īecause the Teensy does not offer any video output capabilities like a Raspberry Pi does, plus, the Raspberry Pi Zero offers an analog output possibility. Whether using WiFi, or 5.8 GHz Analog transmission.

During the development of the project, we weren't sure concerning the method of sending the thermal live video to the ground. We wanted to have the smallest module as possible. It had to be ported to the raspberry Pi Zero. Max Ritter's Thermocam have an UART interface so it can communicate and live stream to a computer, thanks to different orders sent via serial sent commands. This is the element where we had the biggest footprint.

Lepton 3.5 raspberry pi