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Easier to build tCam-Mini

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 02/07/2021 at 18:420 Comments

I found the TTGO V7 V1.4 ESP32 WROVER based development board long after I started tCam-Mini but it's a good way, along with a Lepton Breakout from Group Gets, to even more easily build a camera without having to make and load a PCB. The PSRAM is already part of the WROVER module simplifying the build considerably.  Just need to add a button, dual-color LED, pair of resistors and an electrolytic capacitor.

Wiring is very straight forward.

Two things to note about using the TTGO board. 

  1. It may have only 4 MB of Flash.  This is sufficient for the code but I use an 8 MB version on the PCB.  If you use the Espressif Programming tool to load precompiled firmware you will need to correctly specify the Flash size (see instructions in the "programming" directory on github).
  2. It may have an older revision ESP32 chip.  My TTGO board had a Rev 1 chip.  I specified a module for the PCB that has a Rev 3 chip and I built for that revision.  If the board won't boot (you can see an error message in the serial output) then you can try the version of the precompiled firmware I made for the Rev 1 chip also in the "firmware/precompiled" directory at the github repository.

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