Teledyne FLIR Lepton 3.1R User manual

Teledyne FLIR
Infrared Camera OEM
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Equipment described herein is subject to US export regulations and may require a license prior to export. Diversion contrary to US law is prohibited.
Imagery for illustration purposes only. Specications are subject to change without notice. Rev. 100.
© 2021Teledyne FLIR LLC. Approved for public release.Teledyne FLIR Approved [FLIRGTC-SBA-005]. All rights reserved.
GETTING STARTED WITH THE
RASPBERRY PI AND BREAKOUT BOARD V2.0
Disclaimer
This guide is for the newer breakout board (seen here). Earlier versions of the breakout board do not
include VSYNC
Requirements
• A computer with the ability to read/write to MicroSD cards
• A laptop using Linux was used during this guide.
• A RaspberryPi 2/3
• You can nd them here.
• A MicroUSB to USB-A cable.
• A MicroSD card with at least 8GB of capacity. MicroSD cards preinstalled with NOOBs
can be found here.
• Labelled as 1.

Teledyne FLIR
Infrared Camera OEM
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Equipment described herein is subject to US export regulations and may require a license prior to export. Diversion contrary to US law is prohibited.
Imagery for illustration purposes only. Specications are subject to change without notice. Rev. 100.
© 2021Teledyne FLIR LLC. Approved for public release.Teledyne FLIR Approved [FLIRGTC-SBA-005]. All rights reserved.
• A Lepton camera (2.X/3.X)
• They can be found here. For a higher resolution and telemetry data, it is recommended
that you use a Lepton 3.5.
• Labelled as 2.
• A breakout board V2.0
• Details on the board can be found here.
• Labelled as 3.
• Female-to-Female Jumper cables
• Labelled as 4.
• Some additional software that can be found here.

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Infrared Camera OEM
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Equipment described herein is subject to US export regulations and may require a license prior to export. Diversion contrary to US law is prohibited.
Imagery for illustration purposes only. Specications are subject to change without notice. Rev. 100.
© 2021Teledyne FLIR LLC. Approved for public release.Teledyne FLIR Approved [FLIRGTC-SBA-005]. All rights reserved.
Hardware
Attaching the breakout board to the RPi
You can nd more information on the GPIO and the pinout of the RaspberryPi here. Attach (female-to-
male) jumper wires between the following breakout board pins and the RaspberryPi board:
• (J2 Pin) -> (Proper name) -> (RPi connector pin)
• P8 -> SCL -> GPIO 3
• P5 -> SDA -> GPIO 2
• P12 -> MISO -> GPIO 9
• P7 -> CLK -> GPIO 11
• P10 -> CS -> GPIO 8
• P15 -> VSYNC -> GPIO 17

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Infrared Camera OEM
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Equipment described herein is subject to US export regulations and may require a license prior to export. Diversion contrary to US law is prohibited.
Imagery for illustration purposes only. Specications are subject to change without notice. Rev. 100.
© 2021Teledyne FLIR LLC. Approved for public release.Teledyne FLIR Approved [FLIRGTC-SBA-005]. All rights reserved.
We will also need to connect power and ground to the board:
• (J3 Pin) -> (Proper name)
• P1 (Square pin) -> GROUND
• P2 -> VIN

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Infrared Camera OEM
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Equipment described herein is subject to US export regulations and may require a license prior to export. Diversion contrary to US law is prohibited.
Imagery for illustration purposes only. Specications are subject to change without notice. Rev. 100.
© 2021Teledyne FLIR LLC. Approved for public release.Teledyne FLIR Approved [FLIRGTC-SBA-005]. All rights reserved.
Setting up the MicroSD
You have two options for setting up the Micro SD:
• Using NOOBs to get an image
• Building the image manually
NOOBS
You will need to install the latest Raspbian image to the MicroSD, which can be found here.The simplest
way of installing the new image would be through the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s NOOBs New Out Of the
Box software.
A full guide to installing with NOOBs can be found here.
When installing through NOOBs, you will be walked through the installation and updating the raspberrypi
to the latest version. For the purpose of this guide, the graphical interface wasn’t used.To disable it you
will need to adjust the settings:
Applications Menu > Preferences > Raspberry Pi Conguration:
Boot: “To CLI”
After adjusting this setting, you will need to reboot.
MANUALLY
If you want to install it manually, some instructions can be found here.
Software
Installing the Toolchain and building the Linux kernel from source
For the sake of convenience, I’ll be covering compiling locally on the Raspberry Pi 2/3. For more detailed
instructions, a guide to cross compiling or instructions for a different version of the Pi you can nd the
ofcial documentation here.
Boot up the Pi. We will need access to a terminal and an internet connection.There are some dependen-
cies, install them using the following command:
sudo apt-get install git bc

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Equipment described herein is subject to US export regulations and may require a license prior to export. Diversion contrary to US law is prohibited.
Imagery for illustration purposes only. Specications are subject to change without notice. Rev. 100.
© 2021Teledyne FLIR LLC. Approved for public release.Teledyne FLIR Approved [FLIRGTC-SBA-005]. All rights reserved.
We will now acquire the sources. Warning:This will take some time. We will be including --depth=1,
which will stop the repositories entire history being retreived and reduce the required storage space
and download time signicantly. For reference, the kernel version used for this guide was 4.14.71-v7+.
cd ~
git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux
The new kernel will need to have some particular settings enabled for supporting DMA.The default con-
g for bcm2709 should enable all the necessary options.
cd ~/linux
KERNEL=kernel7
make bcm2709_defcong
Build and install the kernel modules:
make -j4 zImage modules dtbs
sudo make modules_install
sudo cp arch/arm/boot/dts/*.dtb /boot/
sudo cp arch/arm/boot/dts/overlays/*.dtb* /boot/overlays/
sudo cp arch/arm/boot/dts/overlays/README /boot/overlays/
sudo cp arch/arm/boot/zImage /boot/$KERNEL.img
We will need to ensure that the cong.txt le correctly points to our new image.This can be done by
opening the le located at /boot/cong.txt:
cat /boot/cong.txt
Ensure that the following line is present:
kernel=kernel7.img

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Infrared Camera OEM
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Equipment described herein is subject to US export regulations and may require a license prior to export. Diversion contrary to US law is prohibited.
Imagery for illustration purposes only. Specications are subject to change without notice. Rev. 100.
© 2021Teledyne FLIR LLC. Approved for public release.Teledyne FLIR Approved [FLIRGTC-SBA-005]. All rights reserved.
After these steps are completed, reboot your Pi and ensure that the correct linux kernel is running:
sudo reboot
uname -r
Move example software onto Pi
Copy the RaspberryPi onto the Pi. If everything during installation was left to be default, it is recom-
mended that you move it to the home folder.This guide will assume that the folder will be at this loca-
tion:
/home/pi/.
Building the driver and applications
Now, from the RaspberryPi lets build the driver and test applications.
cd ~/RaspberryPi/lepton_module
make -C /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build M=$PWD modules
sudo make -C /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build M=$PWD modules_install
If the module fails to compile, it may be necessary to recompile the kernel, see above.
Setting up device tree and kernel module
We will next need to build the device tree overlay. Run the following command to compile ir-lepton-
00A0.dts:
dtc ir-lepton-00A0.dts -o ir-lepton-00A0.dtbo
Ignore any warnings that come from compiling.You will need to move the .dtbo le into the overlays
folder.
sudo cp ir-lepton-00A0.dtbo /boot/overlays/
You will then need to uncomment following values for ags in /boot/cong.txt:
dtparam=i2c_arm=on
dtparam=i2s=on
dtparam=spi=on

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Infrared Camera OEM
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Equipment described herein is subject to US export regulations and may require a license prior to export. Diversion contrary to US law is prohibited.
Imagery for illustration purposes only. Specications are subject to change without notice. Rev. 100.
© 2021Teledyne FLIR LLC. Approved for public release.Teledyne FLIR Approved [FLIRGTC-SBA-005]. All rights reserved.
This can be done by opening the le and ensuring there is no # in front of them.
sudo nano /boot/cong.txt
This will enable i2c and spi after the Raspberry Pi is rebooted. Alongside uncommenting these, you will
also need to add the following line:
dtoverlay=ir-lepton-00A0
This will enable the overlay you just built.You will need to reboot the RaspberryPi for the changes to
cong.txt to take effect.
sudo reboot
Once the Pi has rebooted, you will need to install the module.This will build the dependencies for all of
the modules depmod -a and then enable the module we compiled modprobe lepton.You will only need
to do this once:
sudo depmod -a
sudo modprobe lepton
We should be set! Lets test if this worked.
Testing the lepton camera
Once everything is connected, compile and run vsync_app under lepton_control
cd ~/RaspberryPi/lepton_control/
make
./vsync_app
The program should terminate quickly after performing various I2C commands. If it runs indenitely,
quit the program, disconnect the VIN and GND, and try again.

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Infrared Camera OEM
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Equipment described herein is subject to US export regulations and may require a license prior to export. Diversion contrary to US law is prohibited.
Imagery for illustration purposes only. Specications are subject to change without notice. Rev. 100.
© 2021Teledyne FLIR LLC. Approved for public release.Teledyne FLIR Approved [FLIRGTC-SBA-005]. All rights reserved.
You can use the lepton_data_collector application to capture grayscale images from the video device.
You will also need to make that too.
cd ~/RaspberryPi/lepton_data_collector/
make
• It consumes raw subframes via the V4L2 /dev/videoN device le (/dev/video0 by default) and
extracts the pixel data.
• For Lepton 3.X (with the command-line argument -3) it assembles four subframes into a single
larger video frame.
• If you are using a Lepton 2.X, use the command line argument -2 instead.
• The image les are named after a prex specied with the -o command-line argument, followed
by a 6-digit (prexed with 0’s for smaller numbers) frame counter and a .gray extension.
• To reduce latency, it is a good idea to have it store frames into memory instead of to a ash de-
vice, so mount a tmpfs directory somewhere and prepend the path to the prex.
Here is an example:
cd ~/RaspberryPi/lepton_data_collector/
sudo su
mkdir /tmp/capture
mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /tmp/capture
./lepton_data_collector -3 -c 50 -o /tmp/capture/frame_
When complete, there should be 50 images captured from Lepton 3.X (about 5 seconds worth at ~9 fps)
named /tmp/capture/frame_000000.gray through /tmp/capture/frame_000049.gray.
These images can be viewed on a Linux system using the ImageJ Java application, available from here.
From the File menu, select Import->Raw..., and set image type to 16-bit unsigned along with the width
and height (80x60 for Lepton 2.X, 160x120 for Lepton 3.X) in the dialog box that appears after selecting
the le name.The entire sequence can be placed into an image stack if the Open all les in folder check-
box is checked. Loading the les into an image stack makes it possible to produce a .avi movie from the
frames using File->Save As->AVI... and setting the frame rate to 9 fps.

Teledyne FLIR
Infrared Camera OEM
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Equipment described herein is subject to US export regulations and may require a license prior to export. Diversion contrary to US law is prohibited.
Imagery for illustration purposes only. Specications are subject to change without notice. Rev. 100.
© 2021Teledyne FLIR LLC. Approved for public release.Teledyne FLIR Approved [FLIRGTC-SBA-005]. All rights reserved.
Troubleshooting
Before troubleshooting
Additional debug information can be retrieved by running:
dmesg | less
“I just can’t seem to get the module to load!”
There might have been either an issue when compiling or the dependencies weren’t correctly found.Try
installing the lepton module manually again:
sudo modprobe lepton
If the lepton module can’t be found, try running the following command to build the dependencies:
sudo depmod -a
Now, run modprobe again. If it outputs another error, try recompiling the kernel.