As part of an ongoing Raspberry Pi Pico-based project, I wanted to create a thermal camera. To do this, I first of all went shopping to find what I needed. Here are the two components for this mini project:

• Adafruit AMG8833 thermal camera breakout (that’s The Pi Hut, you can also get it from Pimoroni. Doesn’t look like Adafruit currently has them on sale, which is odd)
• Adafruit 2.8″ TFT LCD screen (that’s The Pi Hut, you can also get it from Pimoroni and Adafruit)

They’re not cheap components, but they’re what you need. You can get a better thermal sensor. This one is only 8×8, so quite low-resolution, but you get some nice results out of it (see the video below).

I chose CircuitPython for the project, because I’ve learned by now that CP has an enormous number libraries.

As always, Adafruit have provided great guides to both products. The screen tutorial is available here and deals with both wiring up and programming it. The tutorial for the AMG8833 thermal camera (there are two types of breakout boards for the sensor) is available here.

How to combine them, though, that’s the trick. I found this tutorial which uses an Adafruit Pygamer board and the Featherwing version of the AMG8833 breakout. This was enough to get me going with translating the array of pixel values returned from the camera denoting sensed temperatures into colour blocks. I had to strip out a lot of functionality relating to the Pygamer board, which was a bit of a pain if I’m honest, but what I was left with should fit nicely into the project I’m working on.

Here’s the wiring that I used:

and you can find my stripped-down code on GitHub. You will need to save the code onto your Pico as code.py to make it run automatically on power-up. You will also need to copy over some libraries to your Pico, so just take a look at the imports at the top of the code for those. You can find the library bundle here.

Here’s the result of the mini-project: