Awesome project. But $300 is still quite steep for a thing I might maybe use once a year. I really wish these thermal sensors came down in price...
Bought one of these for work (HIKmicro, 160x120/19200pixel) for ~$300. It works, it's quite good compared to any thermal camera I played with 5+ years ago (even the fancy ones).
https://www.amazon.com/HIKMICRO-Resolution-Portable-4%C2%B0F...
It's important to note that camera sensor tech has been advancing quite rapidly these past two decades.
this is a bit like 'i made a working, drivable car from scratch using only basic hand tools, raw materials, and a 2005 honda civic' or 'i built my own operating system around the linux kernel'
https://github.com/google/skywater-pdk
One could make an array of thermopiles, like the hacker that made their own imager out of discrete diodes (digiOBSCURA) . But each pixel would cost $7.
https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/excelitas-technol...
One might be able to make an array of thermistors (possibly with active cooling using a peltier) like the diycamera (digiOBSCURA) below. Might be an application of combining many RC oscillators in a tree and recovering the signal with an FFT. I have a gut feeling this is possible, but haven't show it. Isn't this the same as or similar to your keyboard multiplexer design?
https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/panasonic-electro...
https://github.com/IdleHandsProject/diycamera (digiOBSCURA)
One could experiment with microbolometers on tinytapeout. https://elicit.org/search?q=cmos+microbolometer
i was thinking of directly measuring rc fall times for the keyboard multiplexer rather than running free oscillators
relaxation oscillators will give you a lot of harmonics, might be good or bad
Above is a seminar on analog layout designed to target Tiny Tapeout that went over Magic (by Jonathan Edwards) and Klayout (Thomas Perry). Sky130 and tinytapeout can do analog, but most of the tools and the examples are digital based.
https://i.imgur.com/NespRr4.png
https://www.klayout.de/forum/discussion/1879/video-demo-of-a...
i thought the google shuttle program connected your design to the outside world through some kind of digital bullshit
With Tiny Tapeout the levels of inception increase, we must go deeper and you get 8 bits in and 8 out and the designs are daisy chained. Purely for experimentation. 1000 logic cells or whatever else you can fit in the space.