IoT project using thermal sensors to monitor spaces

by mesto1 • 1 year ago

20 11 1 year ago

anaut1• 1 year ago

cool project :)

Hi! I am the author of this post, feel free to ask any questions about the project! I use this project at home to monitor the kitchen sometimes (:

namshe3• 1 year ago

Very cool and fun project! I am a total dummy when it comes to this kind of hardware stuff and always admire people who do it.

A couple of questions:

* How / where did you get the inspiration for this? To me it's one of those things that seems "obvious" once I see it, but I wouldn't have thought of it on my own first.

* What does that thermal imaging camera "see?" Just heat? Could it detect a person vs. robot vacuum vs. house cat? (relevant for kitchen monitoring especially!)

* From the article, it looks like you're using Python? Are there good libraries available for other ecosystems as well?

infiniteregrets5• 1 year ago

Hi, thank you for your question!

I have been interested in this since I was in college. I was building a capacity counting system for our gym. Our gym used density.io and seemed like a waste of money and I though how about if we could have our own solution homegrown by students. But I couldn't get people on board, but I was able to prototype something.

The thermal camera is just a pixel array, which each pixel is denoting its temperature. Kitchens are tricky, since hot items can gravely affect the temperature readings. I use it at the entrance to check if my roomie is in or not/.

you have drivers for amg8833 in rust and c I believe, but adafruit stuff is good in python so I would say its a good place to start IOT projects! You can write your own drivers, which is quite fun!

glonq2• 1 year ago

Cool! I was just looking at how to build something similar using a presence sensor wired up to some flavor of arduino. But I was hoping to keep it 100% local with little-to-no cloud involved.

infiniteregrets5• 1 year ago

That's awesome! I love the idea of having everything self hosted, but I have various ideas like being able to share the streams on devices etc which i havent built upon. Please do share what you end up building!

glonq2• 1 year ago

Did you also consider the STHS34PF80 sensor? Range is lower (4 meters I think) but it seems to suit needs and is cheaper too.

infiniteregrets5• 1 year ago

Nope! I think I did come across this, but the ecosystem around it didnt seem to be there. You can get AMG8833 for quite cheap in some places

IoT project using thermal sensors to monitor spaces

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