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!