Has anyone had any luck replacing cameras with thermal cameras?

[SMetc]

I've seen a few posts where people have modified the boards to work with intel aero boards, but is it possible to simply change out the cameras on a D4 series camera module with other cameras?

[MartyG]

I thought very carefully about this question. Mechanically it is possible to attach your own camera to a 50 pin connector on the Vision Processor D4 component of the camera. In practice though, Intel do not support custom cameras in the firmware. I believe it only recognizes the standard RGB sensor.

In the D435 cased USB camera, a D430 module is used. this camera module does not have an integrated RGB sensor, and the RGB sensor is attached separately. When the RGB sensor is not attached, the camera's ID reads as D430. When an RGB sensor is attached to the D430, the camera is recognized as a D435 configuration, presumably because the firmware supports this recognition and assigns the appropriate camera ID.

Prior to the point when Intel decided not to support custom cameras, it was said that if a custom camera was attached to the 50 pin connector then it would then only be necessary to run a camera calibration to get the replacement camera to work. In practice though, you would likely have to write your own custom firmware for the camera in order to access a custom sensor on the 50 pin connector. Since Intel do not open-source the firmware, it would be difficult to know where to start in writing your own firmware.

Intel are willing to work with companies on custom RealSense configurations, such as different sensors and different baseline lengths, when the camera is ordered in large volumes.

[MartyG]

I would not rule out either that a 400 Series camera module could work with an Aero Compute Board, as the Aero board is similar to an Up Board (including using an Intel Atom Cherry Trail processor similar to the Up Board's). 400 Series cameras can work with any Intel or ARM processor.

You ought to be able to install RealSense SDK 2.0 on the Aero board's Yocto Linux OS if you use the 'bypass' method for installing the SDK on any flavor of Linux.

https://github.com/IntelRealSense/librealsense/issues/1132# issuecomment-363572666 Linux support · Issue # 1132 · IntelRealSense/librealsense · GitHub

I do not know if it would be feasible to swap out one of the secondary cameras (RGB and VGA) that the Aero board supports for another type of camera such as a thermal one, or if you could stream meaningful data into RealSense SDK 2.0 on the Aero board from that custom camera. Intel's mechanical guide to hooking up cameras to the Aero board will show you what to expect in terms of the connectors that the secondary cameras plug onto though.

https://www.intel.com/content/dam/support/us/en/documents/boardsandkits/aero/aero-platform-uavs-mechanical-assembly-guide.pdf https://www.intel.com/content/dam/support/us/en/documents/boardsandkits/aero/aero-platform-uavs-mechanical-assembly-guid…