The starting idea here is a thermal camera you can carry anywhere: fully portable, versatile, and happy to run off a battery bank. Everything Smart Home turned that into a complete tutorial with a written guide, pairing a Raspberry Pi with an MLX90640 sensor and a 5 inch touch display, and it reads like a build anyone could follow along with.
The assembly looks satisfyingly hands-on. Angled header pins get soldered to pads on the underside of the display PCB, and DuPont jumper wires bridge the Pi's GPIO headers to the sensor, which sits on a Pimoroni breakout board. The whole unit then lives in a custom 3D-printed black enclosure, with the 800x480 HDMI touchscreen driving the visuals. On the software side there is a boot config edit to push I2C to 400000 baud, a check with i2cdetect before anything else runs, and a Python 3 script cloned from GitHub that leans on scipy, numpy and matplotlib.
What stands out to me is the on-screen result: a real-time heatmap with a blue-to-red colour scale, a scale bar, and min and max readings, plus a matplotlib-style toolbar and numerical axis markings on the screen. It feels like proper scientific tooling rather than a toy demo.
For proof it works, the maker aimed it at a 3D printer's heated bed set to 60 degrees Celsius and the readings landed within half a degree of target. The trade-off is speed: around 1.5 frames per second, limited by CPU load from interpolation rather than the interface. Whether tweaking the sensor's control register could lift the framerate is still untested, and a visible light camera overlay is a possible future addition.
Project by Everything Smart Home. Watch it on their YouTube channel: