“The revolutionary Lepton was the world’s first thermal micro camera module integrated into millions of devices from ruggedised smartphones to drones,” said Mike Walters, vice president, product management, Teledyne Flir. “Lepton 3.1R can now propel advancements in cost-saving and lifesaving unattended products ranging from early fire monitoring of critical machinery, electrical switchgear, and data centers to IoT products for smart factory, occupancy monitoring, smart homes, smart appliances, and even elderly care applications.”

The Lepton 3.1R is a drop-in enhancement for existing Lepton-based products. It incorporates the same visual object and space perception interface (VoSPI), inter-integrated circuit (I2C), and electrical and mechanical form and fit as predecessor Leptons to simplify development. Furthermore, according to Teledyne Flir, Lepton continues to be the lowest-cost focal plane array (FPA) based thermal sensor on the market.

Enhanced radiometric thermal performance

All Lepton modules include thermal sensitivity of <50 mK for an uncooled micro thermal camera. Lepton features many proprietary technologies, including wafer-level detector packaging, wafer-scale micro-optics, a custom application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC), and a low-cost, easy-to-integrate camera package. The Lepton family also includes integrated digital thermal image processing and radiometry, the ability to provide the temperature of every pixel in the scene.

Resources for integrators and developers

To help reduce development costs and shorten time to market, users can take advantage of an online Lepton integration toolbox with application notes and source code for testing on Windows, Linux, Raspberry Pi, and Beaglebone. The Teledyne Flir Technical Services team is available to support customers licensing Myflir application software and image-enhancing multispectral dynamic imaging (MSX) and Vivid-IR, helping customers reduce technical risk and maximize performance.