LJMUAstroecology / flirpy

Python library to interact with FLIR camera cores
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FLIR ONE Edge Pro #96

Closed mikelmujika11 closed 1 week ago

mikelmujika11 commented 1 week ago

Hi,

I am interested in buying a thermal camera, but before I buy it I need to make sure that I can access the camera information (frame + temperature values) through Python using OpenCV. Does this library support this type of cameras?

Thanks

jveitchmichaelis commented 1 week ago

Flirpy does support this but not for the Edge Pro. You would need to use one of the "camera cores" like the Lepton or Radiometric Boson.

As far as I'm aware you can't access the Edge Pro via OpenCV anyway as it's a mobile device, but maybe FLIR provide an API for it.

The core used in the Edge Pro is probably a radiometric Lepton anyway.

mikelmujika11 commented 1 week ago

I thought they were like the TOPDON cameras that in addition to connecting to the cell phone can also be connected to the PC. Do you know of any Flir or other brand cameras that are currently sold, with similar features to the Edge Pro, that can be connected to the PC and accessed?

jveitchmichaelis commented 1 week ago

Sorry, no idea about TOPDON. Either way, at this time Flirpy does not support access. It's possible that the camera is a UVC device, in which case you could retrieve imagery but I doubt it returns thermometry without a library.

What features do you need? Happy to give suggestions but I'd need specific requirements. As I suggested, both the Lepton and Boson R return radiometric images and both work with OpenCV through various means. Most of these smaller consumer cameras use a sensor like the Lepton - eg 320px, 9fps. You don't get RGB/MSX but that's cheap to add with a second camera.

Your other option is to look at FLIRs APIs (see Atlas) if they exist and write your own wrapper to talk to OpenCV.

https://www.flir.com/developer/mobile-sdk/ it exists for mobile at least.

Or just buy a TOPDON and use a different library - I'd be happy to work to add support but as I don't own one, I can't do any physical testing. From the code below it looks simple - just a UVC camera with some pixel scaling.

See https://github.com/leswright1977/PyThermalCamera

mikelmujika11 commented 1 week ago

I have found FLIR to be quite limited so I will look for another brand.

thanks for everything

jveitchmichaelis commented 1 week ago

No problem, I don't have any affiliation with any of these companies. If you do buy something, happy to try and add support into Flirpy if we can get it going.

I would say that FLIR's camera cores tend to be pretty good, if expensive, and the interfaces are well documented. They're designed for integrating into other products (otherwise you have the mobile or gun-style devices), so they're quite well supported but you have to build e.g. enclosures and other bits.

Eg if you're going to pay $300 for a topdon and you want something "hackable" you might as well buy the Lepton R with GroupGets' carrier board (you get some more industrial features like hardware triggering and you don't need to reverse engineer stuff). But it would require a bit more integration work and as mentioned you'd need to add a cheap RGB camera.