Python Thermal Camera with Orange PI (AMG8833)

This is a documentation of using AMG8833 infrared array on Orange PI 5 (Plus model) inspired and full-based on the original documentation and code of using it on Raspberry Pi 4 (see repository here).

1. Table Of Contents

• 1. Table Of Contents
• 2. Hardware Configuration
  • 2.1. Wiring Diagram
    • 2.1.1. i2c
    • 2.1.2. Power Supply
    • 2.1.3. Diagram
• 3. Software Configuration
  • 3.1. Bus Number
• 4. Software Output
  • 4.1. Example Output
  • 4.2. Real-Time Interpolated IR Camera

2. Hardware Configuration

2.1. Wiring Diagram

2.1.1. i2c

Using the 40 Pin Expansion Interface Pin Instructions, we have multiple i2c SCL/SDA pin's. We decided to use I2C2_SCL_M4 and I2C2_SDA_M4 (GPIO1_A1 and GPIO1_A0) pins on the Orange PI 5 board pins. See the pinout bellow:

OrangePI 5 Plus Pinout

2.1.2. Power Supply

The AMG8833 is powered by 5V pin on the OrangePI 5 board and we decided to use GND pin on the side of the I2C2_SDA_M4 because the pins on the circled by dot line on the image on the section bellow is used by calor fan.

2.1.3. Diagram

The bellow image contains the connections of the OrangePI 5 Plus and AMG8833 used by the project:

3. Software Configuration

On the scripts we need to change the bus number configuration to get access to the AMG8833 i2c protocol interface.

3.1. Bus Number

When we create the AMG8833() instance, like on the IR_cam_test.py script, we can pass the bus_num argument:

sensor = amg8833_i2c.AMG8833(addr=0x69, bus_num=2)

The bus_num=2 is referencing that we are using I2C2 bus. On the OrangePI5 we have some i2c bus interfaces:

I2C Interfaces

I2C bus	SDA pin	SCL pin	dtbo
I2C2_M0	Pin 3	Pin 5	i2c2-m0
I2C2_M4	Pin 10	Pin 8	i2c2-m4
I2C4_M3	Pin 22	Pin 32	i2c4-m3
I2C5_M3	Pin 27	Pin 28	i2c5-m3
I2C8_M2	Pin 29	Pin 7	i2c8-m2

From the Orange PI 5 Plus documentation, we have a information about I2C2_M0 and I2C2_m4:

I2C2_M0 and I2C2_M4 can only use one of them at the same time, and they cannot be used at the same time.

Based on the above I2C information from the OrangePi we can change the bus_num based on the others pin configurations:

orangepi@orangepi:~$ sudo i2cdetect -y 2 #i2c2 command
orangepi@orangepi:~$ sudo i2cdetect -y 4 #i2c4 command
orangepi@orangepi:~$ sudo i2cdetect -y 5 #i2c5 command
orangepi@orangepi:~$ sudo i2cdetect -y 8 #i2c8 command

Making a parallel on the i2cdetect configuration above, we have a table of bus_num setting:

I2C Bus	bus_num
I2C2_M0	2
I2C2_M4	2
I2C4_M3	4
I2C5_M3	5
I2C8_M2	8

Remember that is necessary to open the i2c buses on the linux system (see page 225 on the OrangePI 5 Plus User Manual).

4. Software Output

4.1. Example Output

The following plot is outputted by the example script:

• /examples/IR_cam_test.py

4.2. Real-Time Interpolated IR Camera

The following plot is outputted by the example script:

• /examples/IR_cam_interp.py