A Thermal Camera That Uses WebUSB

When creating a peripheral for a mobile phone, an obvious path is to create a companion app with which to talk to it. But as we all know today’s app …. A Thermal Camera That Uses WebUSB.

But as we all know today’s app is tomorrow’s non-functional abandonware, so to give his infrared camera a long life, [Cezar Chirila] made it talk WebUSB to a browser instead. The hardware is conventional enough, a FLIR sensor talking to an RP2040. There’s very little in the way of supporting circuitry save for a power supply regulator, as so much that might be on a standalone project is already present in the USB host device.

Running the thing is as simple as going to a landing page in a browser that supports WebUSB, and using the camera. The whole lot is in a GitHub repository, if you’re interested. We’re big fans of WebUSB, for exactly the reason it’s been used here.

While there are a few browser features which have been deprecated over the years — who remembers the BLINK and MARQUEE HTML tags — it’s likely WebUSB won’t be one of them.