Camera Housing for Remote Sensing in IR

This project is a great example of how an Arduino and a few cheap components can give an otherwise prohibitively expensive research idea some life.

A focus of one of the research labs I work in is the urban heat island effect. Our P.I. is interested in monitoring surface temperatures of the built environment over day to week long timescales using high quality thermal cameras.

Deploying a “regular” camera outside would be pretty straight forward– build some sort of enclosure to keep the weather out, and put a window on it. Unfortunately all the usual materials– acrylic or clear polycarbonate, are opaque in the infrared spectrum. Weather proof enclosures do exist for IR cameras, using germanium windows which are transparent to IR. Unfortunately they all proved prohibitively expensive for this project.

The cost effective alternative was an ESP8266, a linear actuator, and a weekend of tinkering. The enclosure has a rain sensor module on top– a resistive element that can sense moisture droplets, signaling the actuator to close the door. The enclosure itself is a Harbor Freight ammo can, painted white, with some access holes for cables. Small paint tangent– I’ve built a few dozen boxes for electrical computer bits that will stay outside for long periods of time, and by far the epoxy coatings, sometimes called appliance enamels, hold up best to the UV and weather.

Our P.I. also liked the idea of being able to remotely control the camera. There’s a few good guides on youtube that detail the pinouts of a generic camera panning head, sometimes sold under the Bescor brand. The idea is that a user can have remote access to a laptop near the camera, running both the camera software and a small python program. That python program, built with TkInter for the UI, sends serial commands to the microcontroller, giving the user the ability to pan the camera around, override the rain sensor to close or open the doors, or do timed pans back and forth at adjustable rates.