IoT project using thermal sensors to monitor spaces | Hacker News Reader

IoT project using thermal sensors to monitor spaces

s2.dev

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Hi! I am the author of this post, feel free to ask any questions about the project! I use this project at home to monitor the kitchen sometimes (:

Very cool and fun project! I am a total dummy when it comes to this kind of hardware stuff and always admire people who do it.

A couple of questions:

* How / where did you get the inspiration for this? To me it's one of those things that seems "obvious" once I see it, but I wouldn't have thought of it on my own first.

* What does that thermal imaging camera "see?" Just heat? Could it detect a person vs. robot vacuum vs. house cat? (relevant for kitchen monitoring especially!)

* From the article, it looks like you're using Python? Are there good libraries available for other ecosystems as well?

Hi, thank you for your question!

I have been interested in this since I was in college. I was building a capacity counting system for our gym. Our gym used density.io and seemed like a waste of money and I though how about if we could have our own solution homegrown by students. But I couldn't get people on board, but I was able to prototype something.

The thermal camera is just a pixel array, which each pixel is denoting its temperature. Kitchens are tricky, since hot items can gravely affect the temperature readings. I use it at the entrance to check if my roomie is in or not/.

you have drivers for amg8833 in rust and c I believe, but adafruit stuff is good in python so I would say its a good place to start IOT projects! You can write your own drivers, which is quite fun!

Thanks for your answer, appreciate it.

Follow-up question - what's your take on using AI to maybe generate a driver for a different language?

I would suggest against it, I feel handicapped using AI sometimes. its helpful in a lot of cases eg repetitive work, but drivers feel like you need to be very careful so I would use AI to learn concepts and write things myself! Good luck!

Sounds like good intuition to me, thank you :)

Cool! I was just looking at how to build something similar using a presence sensor wired up to some flavor of arduino. But I was hoping to keep it 100% local with little-to-no cloud involved.

That's awesome! I love the idea of having everything self hosted, but I have various ideas like being able to share the streams on devices etc which i havent built upon. Please do share what you end up building!

Did you also consider the STHS34PF80 sensor? Range is lower (4 meters I think) but it seems to suit needs and is cheaper too.

Nope! I think I did come across this, but the ecosystem around it didnt seem to be there. You can get AMG8833 for quite cheap in some places

cool project :)

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