Teledyne FLIR Lepton 3.5 Integration

george kollamkulam

Hi,

I was looking to integrate the Teledyne FLIR Lepton 3.5 onto the Starling 2 UAV (running PX4) using SPI/I2C. Could you advise on the steps involved? Would this need any driver level modifications or is sufficient to configure certain pre-defined parameters?

Thanks!

Alex Kushleyev

@george-kollamkulam ,

Please take a look at this document : https://docs.modalai.com/voxl2-d0014/#downward-range-finder-and-flir-lepton

You will need M0157 adapter + actual Lepton sensor. The M0157 adapter will plug into the M0173 camera front end. Then it will be pretty much plug and play.

Let me check how to get M0157 - it does not appear to be in the shop.

Alex

Alex Kushleyev

@george-kollamkulam , can you please check if you already have the M0157 adapter installed in your Starling 2?

Just for completeness, we are updating M0157 to M0187 which has identical functionality but also has additional i2c-gpio circuit to perform a hardware reset of lepton and tof sensor if needed. Also a small change in dimensions.

However, if you already have M0157, which you should, it should work just fine.

Alex

george kollamkulam

@Alex-Kushleyev thanks, I have the M0157 adapter installed on my Starling 2.

george kollamkulam

@Alex-Kushleyev It looks like our Starling 2 UAV has the M0157 adapter, the M0173 board (Yellow PCB that also connects to the 3 AR0144 sensors and the TOF sensor), and the 7pin cable that connects the M0157 adapter to the M0173 board. Just to clarify, this configuration is sufficient to integrate (plug-and-play) the Teledyne FLIR Lepton 3.5 without modifying the drivers? If not, do you have any recommended thermal sensors that can directly fit into this hardware and software architecture? I'd be happy to buy them.

Alex Kushleyev

@george-kollamkulam , yes FLIR Lepton 3.5 just inserts into M0157 board which has the socket for the bare Lepton sensor.

Once you install the sensor into the docket, boot up voxl2 and run voxl-lepton-server. It will autogenerate a default config file /etc/modalai/voxl-lepton-server.conf that will look like this.

{
	"spi_bus":	14,
	"spi_speed":	16000000,
	"en_i2c":	false,
	"i2c_bus":	0,
	"shutter_mode":	"auto",
	"flow_shutter_s":	20,
	"closePeriodInFramesInAir":	1,
	"openPeriodInFramesInAir":	0,
	"desiredFfcPeriodMsInAir":	360000,
	"desiredFfcTempDeltaCentiDegInAir":	600,
	"en_rotate":	false
}

You will need to change the SPI bus to 0 and , set en_i2c to true and i2c_bus to 4 because this is the configuration for this Hardware arrangement (M0173 + M0157) per the following documentation : https://docs.modalai.com/voxl2-d0014/#downward-range-finder-and-flir-lepton

Then you can run voxl-lepton-server again in foreground or enable the systemd server using systemctl enable voxl-lepton-server and systemctl start voxl-lepton-server . After that you shoud be able to see the Lepton output using voxl-portal.

Alex

george kollamkulam

@Alex-Kushleyev thanks, this seems to be working well. Can you also share what voxl-lepton-tracker is used for?

George

Alex Kushleyev

@george-kollamkulam , the lepton tracker is an implementation of optic flow tracker for the lepton data, you can see the details here : https://gitlab.com/voxl-public/voxl-sdk/services/voxl-lepton-tracker/-/blob/master/src/feature_tracker.cpp