The tCam-Mini is really intended to be a remote camera, accessed over WiFi by a host. The closest thing it has to a display is a single red/green status LED, and the only button on the board performs a WiFi reset. There is no screen, no memory card on which to store photos and videos, nor are there any hardware controls on the camera itself. The tCam-Mini is not a self-contained camera device, and it does not work like either a webcam or digital camera. The desktop application provided by Dan is the easiest way to stream data and access the full functionality of the sensor, but a web app and Python library are also in development.

The tCam-Mini is intended as a small, network-only device. tCam-mini uses a JSON-based packet interface, and the easiest way to get up and running is to use the desktop application to view images and stream video. In the images here, the USB cable is being used to deliver power, but all thermal image data is being exchanged with a desktop application over WiFi. TCam-Mini is a command-based, wireless ESP32-driven board using the Lepton 3.5 sensor for thermal imaging. What It Is Looks like a webcam, doesn’t work like one.

While it may look like a webcam, it does not work like one.

Want to see how evenly a 3D printer’s heat bed is warming up, or check whether a hot plate is actually reflowing PCBs at the optimal temperature? How about just seeing how weird your pets would look if you had heat vision instead of normal eyes? A thermal imager like the tCam-mini is the tool for that, but it’s important to understand exactly how the tCam-mini works. The sensor is sold separately, but the campaign made it available as an add-on. The main (and most expensive) component of the tCam-Mini is the Lepton 3.5 sensor, which sits in a socket in the middle of the board. A thermal imager is a camera whose images represent temperatures, making it easy to see things like hot and cold spots, or read the temperature of any point within the camera’s view. A thermal camera is a tool I have been wanting to add to my workbench for quite a while, so when I learned about the tCam-Mini, a wireless thermal camera by Dan Julio, I placed an order.

Flir lepton raspberry pi