How to connect FLIR thermal camera to Raspberry Pi?

Question

I've been trying to connect a FLIR thermal camera to my Raspberry Pi for the past three days. The code is being provided by the manufacturer and can be found here.

I've downloaded the kernel and installed it. I also cloned the v4l2loopback repo, compiled it and copied the .ko file into the correct directory. I even manged to run the sudo modprobe v4l2loopback command and it went off without a hitch.

However, when I get to the final step and attempt to run the command ./v4l2lepton /dev/videoX I get this error: Failed to open v4l2sink device. (No such file or directory)

I have no idea what file they are saying is missing.

I also ran ls -hl /dev/video* it just told me that it couldn't access it because there is not such file or directory. This confuses me because the instructions didn't talk about having to set-up any kind of directory like this.

Answer 1

It sounds like you are connecting the Flir ONE via USB, but the code seems to access the Lepton module inside the device vie SPI and/or I2C. Their readme says:

with the Lepton + basic breakout board.

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It seems there is a way to use it via USB:

• http://www.eevblog.com/forum/thermal-imaging/flir-one-thermal-imaging-camera-teardown-and-hacks/
• http://www.eevblog.com/forum/thermal-imaging/question-about-flir-one-for-android/

Answer 2

According to the source code this error is caused when trying to open a file (probably not an ordinary file, but a device). In variable v4l2dev, this variable is initilized to /dev/video1, but is over written by argv[1]. When you ran the program you used /dev/videoX. It is saying that /dev/videoX does not exist.

I imagine that the docs intend you to replace the X with a number, but were not clear on this.

Have a look for what devices exist: ls -hl /dev/video*