Adafruit AMG8833 IR Thermal Camera FeatherWing

by Adafruit

This is the Thermal Camera FeatherWing: thanks to the Panasonic AMG8833 8x8 GridEYE sensor, it adds heat-vision to any Feather main board.

Using our Feather Stacking Headers or Feather Female Headers you can connect a FeatherWing on top of your Feather board and let the board take flight!

This sensor from Panasonic is an 8x8 array of IR thermal sensors. When connected to your Feather it will return an array of 64 individual infrared temperature readings over I2C. It's like those fancy thermal cameras, but compact and simple enough for easy integration.

This part will measure temperatures ranging from 0°C to 80°C (32°F to 176°F) with an accuracy of +- 2.5°C (4.5°F). It can detect a human from a distance of up to 7 meters (23) feet. With a maximum frame rate of 10Hz, It's perfect for creating your own human detector or mini thermal camera. Adafruit have an easy-to use Arduino and CircuitPython code so you can get started fast. The sensor communicates over I2C. If you have a fast Feather like the ESP8266, ESP32 or Teensy, you can interpolate the 8x8 grid and get some pretty nice results! (The video above shows a peace-sign finger  demo using a Teensy Feather and 24x24 interpolation)

The AMG8833 is the next generation of 8x8 thermal IR sensors from Panasonic, and offers higher performance than it's predecessor the AMG8831. The sensor only supports I2C, and has a configurable interrupt pin that can fire when any individual pixel goes above or below a threshold that you set.

Pair this up with our TFT FeatherWing and some stackin' headers to make the snazzy Thermal Camera demo shown above - Feather and TFT Wing not included.

Technical Details

Check our this detailed guide for wiring diagrams, datasheets, schematics, libraries, code, Fritzing objects, etc!

Product Dimensions: 50.0mm x 23.0mm x 6.1mm / 2.0" x 0.9" x 0.2"

Product Weight: 4.7g / 0.2oz

4 customer reviews

6 years ago
This is a very clever and useful IR thermal camera that with the right software can produce 32x32 thermal images at the rate of 10Hz or can be run in a standby mode every 10 or 60 seconds with interrupt generating temperature thresholds.
by William about Adafruit AMG8833 IR Thermal Camera FeatherWing via REVIEWS.io
6 years ago
The AMG8833 is pretty amazing - low resolution thermal array sensor. However, you need to employ some pretty sophisticated data filtering and analysis algorithms to be able to reliably detect a human in the field of view if that is what you want to use it for since there is considerable noise in each pixel from reading to reading.
by Anonymous about Adafruit AMG8833 IR Thermal Camera FeatherWing via REVIEWS.io
6 years ago
Plug-n-play! Adafruit library examples works out of the box. Here's a Processing sketch that renders the image received from the "grid_eye_pixels" sketch: import processing.serial.*; Serial arduino; PImage thermal; void setup(){ size(240,240); noSmooth(); colorMode(HSB,80.0,100.0,100.0); // init image thermal = createImage(8,8,RGB); // setup serial try{ arduino = new Serial(this,"/dev/cu.usbmodem1421",9600); arduino.bufferUntil(']'); }catch(Exception e){ e.printStackTrace(); } } void draw(){ image(thermal,0,0,width,height); } void serialEvent(Serial s){ String rawString = s.readString(); if(rawString != null && rawString.length() > 0){ try{ JSONArray data = JSONArray.parse(rawString); for(int i = 0 ; i < data.size(); i++){ thermal.pixels[i] = color(map(data.getFloat(i),10.0,60.0,40.0,100.0),100.0,100.0); } thermal.updatePixels(); }catch(Exception e){ e.printStackTrace(); } }else{ println("received empty string"); } } (The delay in Arduino can be reduced btw)
by George about Adafruit AMG8833 IR Thermal Camera FeatherWing via REVIEWS.io