DIY Thermal Vision Camera for < $100

Now, you too can see heat maps of human bodies or car engines like Predator - or identify cold spots and drafts in your house like a home-energy expert. And with a little DIY electronics knowledge, you can do it really inexpensively.

Although the sensor is only an 8x8 array, you can interpolate the readings to emulate a finer grain, and with a little coding, adjust how the temperatures are shown.

A big price-drop on Panasonic's AMG8833 8x8 Grid-EYE thermal sensor array has finally allowed hobby electronics suppliers to create a fun and useful thermal camera at a price everyone can afford - less than $50. Compare that to the more than $250 for a FLiR dev board with an 80x60 grid.

As you might expect at this price point, there are limitations. The sensor is only 8x8 pixels and has a range of less than 25 feet (7 meters). You will not be able to identify enemy paintballers from across the battlefield, and you can't get a full-house image of your heat loss. It requires a brain (Arduino or RasPi) with I2C, libraries and a graphics screen. Most people reading this probably already have a microcontroller and screen, so that's no big deal. But faster processors will give you smoother video feeds.

Here's a great teaser video from Adafruit on how to make this into a cute camera version.

Looks cool right, then see the full tutorial and make one of your own.

Adafruit has two versions of the sensor module: a tiny breakout board (item# 3538) and a Featherwing daughter board (item# 3622) made to snap right into any of their Feather boards. And of course the best thing about getting the Adafruit version is their high quality libraries and well written tutorial. They even have a tutorial on hooking it up to a Raspberry Pi

Sparkfun has also released a breakout board (SPX-14568) from their experimental SparkX labs. It uses their QWIIC connection system and also has a library for Arduino.

All the tutorials I've seen so far use a graphic display. But you could display the output on NeoPixels, on a servo-array or translate it into sounds. You could draw images with sparklers. Since you also have access to the raw data you could store time lapses. Combine this with traditional movement and distance sensors for more accurate navigation for your robots, or add another layer to your home security system. If you can code, you can create anything you want.

For less than $50 you get a useful sensor that's far more than a toy - definitely worth checking out for a wide variety of uses.

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