The PureThermal 1 FLIR Lepton development board by GroupGets supports the USB video class (UVC), and this makes it very easy to capture thermal imaging data from a host PC using standard tools and libraries. If you want to prototype quickly, your application demands increasing processing power, or you simply don't want to hack on the firmware, check out these examples to get started.

Linux Kernel versions less than 4.0 don't match the UVC format UVC_GUID_FORMAT_BGR3 with V4L2_PIX_FMT_BGR24. Applications that use libv4l and depend on the BGR24 format (such as the VideoCapture module of OpenCV) will not be able to use this format. Instead, they will use software scaling to convert RGB565 into RGB24/BRG24, at a loss in color resolution and with expense to CPU.

No code is required to run this. If you need to install gstreamer:

sudo apt-get install gstreamer1.0-tools gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad

To view a live preview:

gst-launch-1.0 v4l2src device=/dev/video0 ! xvimagesink

If you wish to use fixed scaling, you can use the videoscale element and leverage the lighter-weight ximagesink:

gst-launch-1.0 v4l2src device=/dev/video0 ! video/x-raw,format=UYVY \
! videoscale ! video/x-raw,width=640,height=480 ! videoconvert ! ximagesink

The PureThermal1 can natively capture with the following raw types (and a few more):

video/x-raw,format=BGR    *Note that libv4l2 will emulate this type on Linux < 4.0
video/x-raw,format=RGB16
video/x-raw,format=GRAY8
video/x-raw,format=UYVY

Gstreamer is very powerful and can be used to record video and stills, and even stream to remote network locations!

guvcview is a simple USB webcam viewer for linux, and is a great way to test the different format and control capabilities of the PureThermal 1.

sudo apt-get install guvcview

Then just run:

guvcview

Video preview and capture example leveraging AVFoundation on OS X.

Build this example using XCode on OS X, PT1Recorder.xcodeproj

cd python

Basic video capture from the Pure Thermal 1 with the cv2.VideoCapture module.

Install python-opencv if you do not have it already:

sudo apt-get install python-opencv

Run the example:

./opencv-capture.py

See note above for Linux + V4L + OpenCV compatibility.

This example uses ctypes to hook into libuvc to show a cross-platform way of accessing CCI over USB extensions.

You'll need the modified version of libuvc from groupgets/libuvc.

git clone https://github.com/groupgets/libuvc
cd libuvc
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make && sudo make install

If you don't want to install this system-wide, you can copy the shared library to your working directory.

Then run the example:

./uvc-deviceinfo.py

The example prints the Lepton's software and hardware version information.

This example uses ctypes to hook into libuvc and circumvents the troubles associated with using OS camera capture drivers, particularly on Mac OS X, whose standard capture drivers do not support the Y16 data type for grabbing raw sensor data.

This example leverages the Radiometric Lepton 2.5. The same approach can of course modified to support other Leptons as well.

You'll need the modified version of libuvc from groupgets/libuvc.

git clone https://github.com/groupgets/libuvc
cd libuvc
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make && sudo make install

If you don't want to install this system-wide, you can copy the shared library to your working directory.

Then run the example:

./uvc-radiometry.py

If you don't already have them, install development tools. For Ubuntu, that looks like this:

sudo apt-get install autotools-dev autoconf build-essential

You'll also want a few support libraries for V4L:

sudo apt-get install libv4l-dev v4l-utils

Then:

cd v4l2
./autogen.sh
./configure
make

Shows how to grab frames from video stream, saves 20 of them to disk in ppm format

grab/pt1-v4l2-grab

This code sets up v4l2 controls for Lepton CCI with UVC extension units with libwebcam/uvcdynctrl.

First install uvcdynctrl:

sudo apt-get install uvcdynctrl

Now you can load the control definition file:

cd uvcdynctrl
uvcdynctrl -v -d /dev/video0 -i pt1.xml

You can now alter Lepton CCI functions using the standard V4L2 APIs. Guvcview is a quick way to try out some of these controls.