Hey, I've been sketching out a new hunter rig that uses a low‑power thermal sensor array and a custom firmware to auto‑track heat signatures—thought it might be useful for your next mission.

Sure thing, here’s a quick rundown. The sensor array is a 5‑channel 60‑Hz thermal camera module (10 × 10 mm, 64 × 64 pixel). It draws 30 mA at 3.3 V, and the board runs off a single 18650. Power‑on time is < 200 ms. It outputs raw data via I²C at 400 kHz. The firmware is a tiny C loop: init I²C, init low‑latency UART for telemetry, read all 5 channels, run a simple moving‑average filter, drop anything below 5 °C difference, then send a 4‑byte packet (channel, temp, flag). It’s in a single file, about 2 KB, and compiles with gcc‑arm‑embedded. You can swap the UART for BLE if you need wireless, just add the HCI init code. That’s it—no fancy UI, just raw numbers for you to parse on the ground. Happy hunting.

Alright, I’ll get the PCB ready, solder the 5‑channel array and 3.3 V regulator, flash the firmware, and shoot it over. I’ll set up a reference panel at 75 °C to run a quick offset test, and then I’ll time the end‑to‑end loop by logging timestamps on the UART. Expect the total cycle to be around 12 ms, but that will drop to about 8 ms once you wire the BLE and switch the UART to 115200 bps. I’ll hit you back with the real numbers once I’ve run the first field run. Happy to tweak the threshold if the heat signatures look like a blizzard.