[fest]

There's another path to cheap thermal imaging- some premium cars have had thermal imagers for night vision (animal, pedestrian detection) for ~10 years.

The most common such system is Autoliv NV3, which is using the same sensor as Tau2/Flir E4/E8 (~320x256px). The original processing electronics does have protection preventing the use of it without car's ECU (though it's already broke), but the sensor interface is reverse engineered. Due to the age of the vehicles and the fact that the protective window in front of the lens is easily damaged, the modules can be bought relatively cheaply (I got mine for ~150EUR).

I made a breakout board for the sensor and have a more-or-less working nmigen gateware (using glasgow): https://github.com/festlv/isc0901b0-breakout

I don't have it fully working yet, as the sensor requires bias values to be sent for each pixel and Glasgow didn't have enough on-board memory to store them, and the thermal image without correct bias values is more or less unusable (many pixels are underexposed/overexposed).

I have hardware ready for ECP5 development board with enough onboard RAM but life got in the way, so it's still sitting in the pile of unfinished projects :/

There's also next generation (Autoliv NV4 == Veoneer NiVi4) which is based on 640x512 Boson sensor, though there is a lot less information about it.