[Maker’s Fun Duck] has a recent video review of a cheap thermal camera from a company called Kaiweets, which you can see below. It checked all of his boxes: It was standalone, handheld, cheap, and not too cheap. The question is: does it work well for the kinds of things we would do with such a camera?
That’s a tricky question, of course, because everyone’s uses are different. Considering a soldering iron. A tiny one is great for working on PCBs, but lousy for soldering large coax connectors. A soldering gun works well for that purpose, but is too much for the PCB. The same goes for thermal cameras. Some are great for, for example, finding leaky parts of houses, but might not be so great at locating defective components on a PCB.
[Duck] starts out looking at coffee cups and hand prints. But he quickly moves on to printed circuit boards like a 3D printer controller. He also provides a number of tips on how to get accurate readings.
He seems to like the camera. But your use case might be different. There are some advantages to having cameras connected to your phone, for example, and there are other considerations. The camera appears to have a 256×192 resolution and can connect to a PC. It retails on the street for around $250.
Small cameras are valuable, even if you need to cable them to a phone. Like many things, thermal cameras get better and cheaper every year.
Unless you have a daily need for such a thing, it would probably get used a few times and end up in a drawer.
I could live with the fact that I have Thermal camera in the drawer.
Perfect…. Me two… (I could even fit two in my draw so that when the batteries leak in the first it reminds me to take em out of the 2nd)
I acquired several tau2 blocks with lenses from equipment pulls with low hours.
Thus far I’ve made a thermal vision kit with some fpv goggles for the kids, switchable to IR and cmos for pwning night time wide games.
And hooked one up for inspecting heat leaks from the home for helping friends insulate.
Welcome more ideas.
My drone isn’t big enough to carry one.
So…you need a bigger drone?
Damn, I need to find that equipment to take apart. I’ve been wanting to build something like that. Have you posted your build anywhere? It would be cool to check out.
On a new design for a PCB, first time I power it up is with a thermal camera pointing at it. It has helped spot faults before things go info smoke.
Likewise, when we get a PCB for repair, simply powering it up with a thermal camera pointing at it, pinpoints the fault in roughly 50% of the cases.
If the first commandment in electronics is “thou shalt check voltages”, I’d argue the second should be to check temperatures.
This seems like the one serious reason to get a thermal camera (out of a bunch of fun reasons), but is it even practical with the kind of super-low-res cameras that fit in the “impulse buy” price range? I feel like in a 32×24 pixel image you might not even see that a tiny SMT part is red hot, or you’d have to spend a lot of time getting the camera set up.
That’s also my general hesitation about thermal cameras, that it’s probably cumbersome to use them a lot of the time because you’ll want to look at something while watching it on screen and having your hands free. It has occurred to me that rather than the overlaid visible camera, it might be more useful if cameras had a built-in pico projector, so the actual thing you’re looking at just lights up red when it’s hot.
From article: “The camera appears to have a 256×192 resolution”
Old German proverb: Haben ist besser als Brauchen.
“It is better to have than to need”
The translation is actually “Having is better than needing”, but I guess saying it the way you did sounds more like a proverb lol
Well actually infinitives in Germanic languages and English don’t translate that cleanly, both can be perfectly valid translations.
“Don’t buy a thermal camera, make friends with someone who bought a thermal camera”
The same goes for scaffolding and pickup trucks.
If I make another friend who is a friend to use my truck to move stuff around, I am going to drag him behind it
B^)
Ive got a daqri AR helmet with thermal imaging. Once or twice a year I end up pulling it off its display stand and powering it up to use the thermal cam. While its only once or twice a year, Its not the most convenient format to use sometimes but if I didnt have it available Id probably have bought a thermal cam by now. I own many MANY tools I use far LESS frequently.
You might be surprised at the uses you come up with when one is handy. I’ve used them for everything from diagnosing flawed plywood (the area over the voids warms up and cools down faster when the air temperature changes) to hacky calibration of RF power measurement (find the bias point where applying RF drive doesn’t change the amplifier’s temperature, then the change in RF+DC input power must equal the output power, and the camera has better much response time and less trouble with coupled RF than anything else).
The decreasing prices are opening up a lot more use cases like that. The ET13S and siblings are stupidly capable for the price (and come with a neat multimeter built in, but don’t believe the voltage rating!). The fun value is also significant.
I agree. At work we use IR camera for:
– evaluating bearings and electric motors
– finding winch rope friction points
– evaluating power distribution boards – loose connections, failing breakers etc.
– HVAC ducting and equipment thermal bridges
I got a pretty nice FLIR for 159 on Amazon.
yeah that’s the struggle with so many tools. for example, i was gifted a little digital microscope and i’m surprised to find i actually use it a couple times a year. it’s pretty handy. but still it goes 6 months or more and i don’t even think about it. assuming an optimistic lifespan, i figure i might use it 20 times before i throw it away?
Have you used it to remove slivers?
I have had a thermal camera in the house since 2018 (lepton 3.5) followed by a hti 301 a year later, and I can safely say there have been very few days in that time where it went a whole 24 hours without getting used. From finding & observing wildlife in the woods, improving insulation & drafts around the house, detecting water leaks, observing blood vessels, seeing who has been spilling their drinks at parties, and consensual observation thru the clothes off your significant other. And there’s more. Go and buy one today.
I have had a thermal camera in the house since 2018 (lepton 3.5) followed by a hti 301 a year later, and I can safely say there have been very few days in that time where it went a whole 24 hours without getting used. From finding & observing wildlife in the woods, improving insulation & drafts around the house, detecting water leaks, observing blood vessels, seeing who has been spilling their drinks at parties, and consensual observation thru the clothes of your significant other. And there’s more. Go and buy one today.
I have had a thermal camera in the house since 2018 (lepton 3.5) followed by a hti 301 a year later, and I can safely say there have been very few days in that time where it went a whole 24 hours without getting used. From finding & observing wildlife in the woods, improving insulation & drafts around the house, detecting water leaks, observing blood vessels, seeing who has been spilling their drinks at parties, and consensual observation thru the clothes of your significant other. And there’s more. Go and buy one today.
I have used thermal cam for finding rodents in the house (4 legged rodents).
Good for birds in the roof as well.
And if you own a dog or two, it is great for finding fresh fresh piles if you know they dropped one but you didn’t see where…
Oh! I think that is what I need for wife acceptance of purchase!
B^)
always glad to help!
For even more fun, figure out how it works! It uses vanadium oxide microbolometers. I made a scale model of one pixel and cut it out on a laser cutter for classroom demonstrations. It’s also interesting trying to figure out who makes the sensor and why they are so low cost. Fascinating technology.
Easy thing to get relative accuracy is to put some thick (so it’s somewhat opaque) kapton tape on what you’re interested in. It has very well characterized emissivity. It’s not perfect, and can be quibbled over endlessly, but it works really well to get fairly close readings off of metals, white resins, etc.
Terminal or thermal?
I have a thermal camera that attaches to a phone. It will always work, since the phone is an old one that I keep just for this purpose. It’s always in airplane mode, so the software won’t be changing. The main downside is that it takes a while to turn on. Also, I can’t charge it while using the camera.
I had a plumber at my house last year for a clogged drain. he said he couldn’t find the clog.
I poured hot water down the drain until it stopped, then got my thermal camera to work to find it. took 10 minutes of staring at pipes until I found one that was warm on one side and cold on the other.
the plumber fixed the problem and was done in half an hour, and said he was buying one of those thermal cameras the next day.
Nice!
I had bought one to try to find where mice were getting into the house. But before that, I had a blocked drain on the kitchen sink. A long snake wasn’t finding the blockage. I tried boiling water down the drain but it was still not clearing. Eventually, like you, I grabbed the camera, followed the ABS drain pipe in the basement and determined where I needed to cut the pipe, run the snake, and install a coupler. One job and the camera was more than paid for!
” A soldering gun works well for that purpose, but is too much for the PCB”
DiodeGoneWild on YouTube would disagree.
Mustool MT13S is a multimeter with thermal camera that can be found for less than 125 euro @banggood
I don’t think that these cameras are getting cheaper every year. I have been following them but the price is either same or increased with inflation. Unless, there is a breakthrough with sensor manufacturing, there won’t be a significant drop in the price afaik.
The same sensor sold under the name Thermal Master was something like $175 on sale awhile back. I think it’s 200 at the moment. They’ve come down some on average, I think.
Did a lot of materials research with IR imaging the last couple of decades, including some low-cost stuff:
You can get ZnS lenses used for IR laser cutters for not very much and turn your cheap imager into a cheap thermal imaging microscope with a bit of frustration and 3D printing for lens holders – I’ve gotten a simple microbolometer camera down into the tens of microns range that way. Setting it up and focusing etc. is a PITA but you’ll get there.
The small thermopile chips are great for detection, not so great for resolution/imaging since their innate resolution is so small (8 x 8 etc.) – at this point, anything that works as a camera (as below) is your friend.
“Real” IR cameras have all kinds of ITAR technology restrictions, supposedly for security purposes that limits frame rate to 9FPS – and requires ridiculous paperwork, but most of the cameras that you buy online will run at 25 – 30 FPS just fine, and most show as a plug-in camera on a PC (a godsend if you’re actually trying to get results in the lab). Whether these could be used as a heat seeking weapon is debatable but regulations is regulations.
Are they useful? Absolutely – everything from bad circuit points to lost parakeets hiding the bookshelves, not to mention the actual research. It’s very creepy bringing one into the woods at night, though.
Oh, I had thought I might need germanium. This seems interesting; was it a specific lens that managed the tens of microns? Using the common 256×192 microbolometer sensor type.
The interesting idea I had, although I haven’t got a VR headset, is that apparently the UVC “usb video camera” aka webcam that these represent themself to a computer as is the same standard that you can feed to a VR headset to be displayed. Otherwise, maybe a pi zero could convert to hdmi or a zero w could be a miracast client or something? (In order to not need a phone and phone app.)