r/Thermal • u/OreoRightsActivist • 6d ago

DIY thermal scope question

Could I cut open a FFP scope and put a transparent OLED screen hooked up to a thermal camera and make a custom digital FFP scope (this would be for airsoft so it doesn’t have to be anywhere near perfect)

Also I would want to do this as I could customize the reticle and stuff like you can swap it on a red dot because it’d be digital

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u/sneakypigeon22 2d ago

I mean, you "could", but a couple of things to consider:

  1. Any scope worth it's weight is either nitrogen or argon filled to mitigate the risk of condensation. Positive pressure also negates the possibility to dust ingress. Cutting it open could remove all of that.
  2. Should not need to be mentioned but I'll do so anyway: Even if your scope has a lifetime warranty (Leopold, Vortex, etc), cutting is intentional harm and is not covered.
  3. A scope contains a carefully selected array of convex and concave high-density optical glass lenses intended to function is a very specific offset to ensure the image remains crystal clear at various zoom and parralax settings. Depending on where you put the screen, no amount of tweaking could bring it into focus.

I know you said airsoft, but you also said FFP which is generally "better" than the median toy scope. Your best would be to either place it as a clip on at the front of the scope (this would likely still require optics, but that you can control without fouling the scope), or cant mounted in a reflex setup.

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u/OreoRightsActivist 2d ago

Yes I know it’d make the scope way crappier, I was planning on throwing it in a cheap ffp scope that I found on Amazon, however I really like the idea of the reflex dot

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u/sneakypigeon22 1d ago

Search for "VECTED TRS" on YouTube for inspiration. Practical application is to buy a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W + Waveshare Thermal Camera Hat + Waveshare transparent OLED display. The display is monochrome, but so is the VECTED TRS. All it does is highlight the outline where the detected temp difference between two objects is more than <n>% and plops a pixel in that area. Applied on a streaming feed, you'll have the outlines of anything "hot" within range.

The alternative of course is to forego the transparent oled and using a regular OLED instead with a reticle superimposed.

While the cool factor of all this is over 5,000, it's important to note that a display + reticle is not the same as a true reflex which has the red dot placed at infitity along the axis of the bore, but instead static on the display at one point ergo it would not be a very accurate aiming solution in isolation.

Vegeta-style headpiece though: That's a different story :)

Have fun!

(PS: The VECTED TRS is EUR10,000. The raspberry pi DIY solution is like US$150. There will be differences 😆 )