This is my design of a cheap and affordable thermal camera (< $60, excl shipping)!. It utilizes the MLX90640 as the image sensor, and the esp32 to process and display the images on a TFT LCD screen.en.

I made this project because off the shelf thermal cameras are exuberantly expensive, and I need one to figure out if my PCBs are shorting.

The hardest part of this project so far was designing the battery charging circuit, as I needed to use multiple ICs to charge the battery, keep the voltage stable, and to keep the battery from overcharging.

You can find the firmware in the thermal_camera folder.

The firmware is written with the Arduino IDE. The ESP32 is used to read the thermal camera and display the images on the TFT LCD screen.

1. Open the Arduino IDE.
2. Install the TFT_eSPI library and MLX90640 library by Adafruit.
3. Create a thermal_camera.h file in C:\Users\YourUsername\Documents\Arduino\libraries\TFT_eSPI\User_Setups
4. Paste in the following code:

#define ILI9341_DRIVER

#define TFT_WIDTH 240 

#define TFT_HEIGHT 320 


#define TFT_MISO 8 

#define TFT_MOSI 6 

#define TFT_SCLK 5 

#define TFT_CS 15 

#define TFT_DC 4 

#define TFT_RST 16 

#define TFT_BL 7 


#define TOUCH_CS 10


#define SPI_FREQUENCY 40000000

5. Open C:\Users\YourUsername\Documents\Arduino\libraries\TFT_eSPI\User_Setup_Select.h
6. Add the line #include .h> to the file under User_Setup.h
7. Compile and upload the firmware to the ESP32.

The total cost of the project is about $86 USD: (Spreadsheet)