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IR visor

  • Hardware
  • Working prototype
  • Since Aug 2026

A night-vision monocular you press to your right eye: a Raspberry Pi, an infrared camera and lamp, and a round screen behind an eyepiece.

Notes

It’s a long, spyglass-like box. The camera and a 10 W infrared LED sit at the far end; you look in from the other, through a D50 F50 eyepiece lens at a round display about 57 mm across. A Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W runs the whole thing headless.

The LED is 850/940 nm with a collimator lens, on a constant-current driver with MOSFET PWM dimming. It’s cooled by a passive copper heatsink, with no fan, so the visor stays silent. An INA219 keeps track of the 16.8 V Li-ion pack, which has its own BMS.

A rotary encoder drives a circular on-screen menu for LED brightness, screen brightness, ISO and exposure. The picture comes from a Python app on Picamera2 and OpenCV, which corrects the colour cast infrared gives everything and can stream hardware-encoded H.264 to a PC.

The case is 3D-printed in PETG and designed in SolidWorks. Along the way I also wrote a small tool that turns a flatbed scan into a DXF cutout.