Running FOSS on a Thermal Camera

Nowadays there’s multiple community projects working on upstream support for mobile phones, tablets (e.g. postmarketOS) and some networking devices (e.g. OpenWrt). But companies also started using complex software stacks in other embedded devices. When taking a closer look at his latest tool, a thermal imager, Sebastian found a serial port and noticed it’s running some kind of Linux based OS and got curious.

In this talk Sebastian will present the downstream software stack running on the device. Then he explains how he ran his own mainline based kernel (with the goal of upstreaming any required changes) on the device without access to device specific source code or documentation. Last but not least he will also show how to access the thermal image data and the current state of reverse engineering this data.

Sebastian Reichel, Collabora

Video: YouTube

Slides:

oil painting of a robot dressed as a chef in paris with eiffel tower in the background

Sebastian Reichel is working on hardware enablement of embedded devices as a kernel engineer for Collabora. He is also maintaining the power-supply subsystem containing battery related code since almost a decade.

In his free time he can either be found at his local hackerspace, or at the fire brigade where he is the deputy lead of the rescue diving squad.