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A project log for Lepton 3.5 Thermal Imaging Camera

Documenting my experiments with the FLIR Lepton 3.5 thermal imaging camera.

dan-julioDan Julio 02/21/2022 at 17:580 Comments

It's a mobile age.   My vision for the tCam devices were to access them through an application running on my laptop but there are a lot of scenarios - as many users have pointed out - where it makes more sense to view through a mobile device.  For example when flying a tCam-Mini on a drone.

The Xojo development environment I use to write non-firmware software has long supported iOS as an output and they are now in beta test of an Android output as well so I figured it was time to finally dig in to app development.  Although I personally use Android (despite being an Apple desktop user) I started with iOS because of its maturity (and the fact that Xojo Android beta doesn't support sockets yet).  A few weeks later I'm proud to announce the first version of an iOS app available in the App Store.  It runs on iPhone and iPad.  The first version lacks some features compared to the Desktop app but I hope to improve it over time.

It provides for control of the camera's AGC, Gain and Emissivity.  It stores the radiometric images in the same json file format as used by the Desktop application (.tjsn files) and exports its private documents folder so these files can be downloaded from a computer. And it can export jpg images with or without metadata to any of the normal iOS destinations.

The libraries and rendering code I had written for the Desktop app ported right over.  Most of the time was spent dealing with the very different paradigms involved in creating mobile apps (types of controls, screen management, dynamic aspect ratios) and preparing for the App Store.

I will port this code into a xojo Android project just as soon as they support sockets (required to communicate with the camera).  I want this app running on my phone too.

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