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Background: the Topdon TC-004 Mini Thermal Infrared Camera

Matthias Wendel (youtube woodworker and author of jhead) just posted a video that showed off the (sponsored/promoted) new Topdon TC-004 Mini¹, a low-end handheld (pistol-grip style) Thermal Infrared camera that was cheaper than any of the attach-to-your-phone ones. The phone ones are clever in a couple of ways:

• Very Small: I keep a first-gen Seek Thermal in my pocket with my keys, it's that small - great for diagnosing overheating equipment like robot grippers
• Cheap: the UI is entirely software, on the phone you already have; the phone supplies the battery and connectivity too
• Well Integrated:- even with a proprietary app to talk to the camera (though the Seek Thermal device does show up under video4linux so it's not completely proprietary) you can just point Google Photos or Syncthing or Syncopoli at the folder and it's immediately part of your existing phone-photo workflow.

Handheld ones do have their own benefits, though:

• One-handed Use: Touch-screen triggers on phones are pretty clumsy and even when you "borrow" a volume button for the trigger, it's still usually not in a convenient place for holding and seeing the unobstructed screen.
• Much Easier to "Point and Shoot": the mechanics of a pistol grip are natural and comfortable, especially for being clear about what you're pointing at.

Even though the TC-004 Mini is pretty slow to power up, it's not complex, just hold the power button for "more seconds than you think you should" - five full seconds - compared to fidgeting with getting a device attached to your phone and getting an app running, it's dramatically more "ergonomic", and a lot easier to just hand to someone else to shoot with.

Great, you got a new toy, what's the infrastructure part of this?

The problem is that this is a new device and it doesn't really have any software support (apparently even on Windows, the existing Topdon app doesn't talk to it.) It does advertise itself as a PTP² device:

Bus 003 Device 108: ID 3474:0020 Raysentek Co.,Ltd Raysentek MTP
  bDeviceClass            6 Imaging
  bDeviceSubClass         1 Still Image Capture
  bDeviceProtocol         1 Picture Transfer Protocol (PIMA 15470)

and while gphoto2 does support PTP, it didn't recognize this device. Turns out that while it's not generic, it's also not that complicated, a little digging turned up a code contribution for support from earlier this year - with a prompt response about it getting added directly to libgphoto2. Checking on github shows that there was a 2.5.32 release about a month later which is convenient for us - the immediately previous release was back in 2023 so this could have ended up a messier build effort of less-tested development code.

Having a source release doesn't mean having an easy to install package, though - usually you can take an existing package, apt-get source and then patch the source up to the new upstream. Still, it's worth poking around to see if any distributions have caught up... turns out the Ubuntu packages are at 2.5.28 from 24.04 through the literally-just-released-yesterday 25.10. Debian, on the other hand, has a 2.5.32 package already in Testing - it won't be in a stable release for a while (the latest stable was only two months ago) but that means testing itself hasn't had much time for churn or instability.

Ok, you're running Ubuntu 24.04 though...

Now we're at the "real" reason for writing this up. gphoto2 doesn't particularly need anything special from the kernel so this is a great opportunity to use a container!

We don't even have to be too complicated with chasing down dependency packages, we can just build a Debian Testing container directly:

mmdebstrap --variant=apt --format=tar \
           --components=main,universe \
           testing - | podman import - debian-testing-debstrap

(Simplified for teaching purposes, see the end of the article for caching enhancements.)

podman image list should now show a localhost/debian-testing-debstrap image (which is a useful starting point for other "package from the future" projects.)

Create a simple Container file containing three lines:

FROM debian-testing-debstrap
RUN apt update && apt full-upgrade
RUN apt install -y gphoto2 usbutils udev

(gphoto2 because it's the whole point, usbutils just to get lsusb for diagnostics, and udev entirely to get hwdb.bin so that lsusb works correctly - it may help with the actual camera connect too, not 100% sure of that though.) Then, build an image from that Containerfile and

podman image build --file Containerfile --tag gphoto2pod:latest

Now podman image list will show a localhost/gphoto2pod. That's all of the "construction" steps done - plug in a camera and see if gphoto2 finds it:

podman run gphoto2pod gphoto2 --auto-detect

If it shows up, you should be able to

podman run --volume=/dev/bus/usb:/dev/bus/usb gphoto2pod \
   gphoto2 --list-files

(The --volume is needed for operations that actually connect to the camera, which --auto-detect doesn't need to do.)

Finally, you can actually fetch the files from the camera:

mkdir ./topdonpix
podman run --volume=./topdonpix:/topdonpix \
           --volume=/dev/bus/usb:/dev/bus/usb gphoto2pod \
           bash -c 'cd topdonpix && gphoto2 --get-all-files --skip-existing'

which should fill your local ./topdonpix directory with images like this one:

Note that if you want to do software processing on these images - as they come off the camera, they're actually sideways and have rotate 270 in the EXIF metadata - so your browser will do the right thing, and a lot of other photo tools, but if you're feeding them to image processing software, you may want to use jpegtran or exiftran to do automatic lossless rotation on them (and crop off the black margins and battery charge indicator - really, this camera is just screenshotting itself when you ask it to store an image...)

Extras: caching

The mmdebstrap|podman import above is perfectly fine for a one-off that works the first time. However, if you're iterating, you can save yourself³ time and bandwidth by running apt-cacher-ng so that you don't have to redownload the same pile of packages - 90 for the base install, 91 for gphoto2 and dependencies. And sure, you'll just reuse the debian-testing-debstrap image - but the configuration gets set up by mmdebstrap in the first place, so you get those "for free", even though the real benefit is in the other half of the application packages.

First, actually install it:

$ sudo apt install apt-cacher-ng
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  apt-cacher-ng
Configuring apt-cacher-ng
-------------------------

Apt-Cacher NG can be configured to allow users to create HTTP tunnels, which can be used to access remote
servers that might otherwise be blocked by (for instance) a firewall filtering HTTPS connections.

This feature is usually disabled for security reasons; enable it only for trusted LAN environments.

Allow HTTP tunnels through Apt-Cacher NG? [yes/no] no
Created symlink /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/apt-cacher-ng.service → /usr/lib/systemd/system/apt-cacher-ng.service.

That's enough to get it running and automatically (via systemd) start properly whenever you reboot.

Next, tell mmdebstrap to use a post-setup hook to tweak the "inside" configuration to point to the "outside" cache (these are mostly covered in the mmdebstrap man page, this is just the specific ones you need for this feature):

• --aptopt='Acquire::https::Proxy "DIRECT"' which says "any apt sources that use https don't try to cache them, just open them directly
• --aptopt='Acquire::http::Proxy "http://127.0.0.1:3142"' tells the apt commands that mmdebstrap runs to use the apt-cacher-ng proxy. This only works for the commands on the outside, run by mmdebstrap while building the container
• --customize-hook='sed -i "s/127.0.0.1/host.containers.internal/" $1/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/99mmdebstrap' After all of the container setup is done, and we're not running any more apt commands from the outside, use sed to change the Proxy config to point to what the container thinks is the host address, host.containers.internal⁴ so when the commands in the Containerfile run, they successfully fetch through the host's apt-cacher-ng. (99mmdebstrap is where the --aptopt strings went.)

Final complete version of the command:

mmdebstrap \
  --customize-hook='sed -i "s/127.0.0.1/host.containers.internal/" $1/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/99mmdebstrap' \
  --aptopt='Acquire::http::Proxy "http://127.0.0.1:3142"' \
  --aptopt='Acquire::https::Proxy "DIRECT"' \
  --variant=apt --format=tar \
  --components=main,universe  testing - \
  | podman import - debian-testing-debstrap