We keep thinking about buying a better thermal camera, as there are plenty of advantages. While [VoltLog’s] review of the Topdon TC002 was interesting though, it has a connector for an iPhone. Even if you aren’t on Android, there is a rumor that Apple may (or may be forced to) change connectors which will make it more difficult to connect. Of course, there will be adapters, and you can get a USB C version of the same camera.
Technically, the camera is pretty typical of other recent cameras in this price range, and they probably all use the same image sensor. The camera provides 256×192 images.
Thermal cameras are great if you want to get an idea of what’s hot and what’s not. If you want to use a thermal camera for certain machine vision tasks, though, you generally need to do a geometric calibration to understand what the camera is seeing and correct for lens distortion. [Henry Zhang] has shared various methods of doing just that.
It’s all about generating a geometrically-regular thermal pattern.
To calibrate a thermal camera, first you need a thermal pattern. This is like typical test image for a camera or screen, but with temperatures instead of colors. [Henry] explains several methods for doing this. One involves using a grid of nichrome wires to create a thermal pattern for calibration purposes. Another uses discs of cold aluminium inserted into a foam board. Even a simple checkerboard can work, with the black spaces heating up more from ambient sunlight than their neighbouring white spots. [Henry] then explains the mathematical techniques used for calibrating based on these patterns.
Hedges aren’t just a pretty garden decoration. They’re also a major habitat for many species of insects, birds, and other wildlife. In some areas, a lot of hedge trimming goes during the time that local birds are raising their fledglings, which causes harm at a crucial time. Thus, [Johann Elias Stoetzer] and fellow students were inspired to create Hedge Watcher.
Birds can easily blend in with their surroundings, but thermal cameras are a great way to spot them.
The concept is simple – using thermal vision to spot birds inside a hedge when they may not otherwise be easily visible. Many species blend in with their surroundings in a visual manner, so thermal imaging is a great way to get around this. It can help to avoid destroying nests or otherwise harming birds when trimming back hedges. The idea was sourced from large-scale agricultural operations, which regularly use thermal cameras mounted on drones to look for wildlife before harvesting a field.
However, staring at a thermal camera readout every few seconds while trimming hedges isn’t exactly practical. Instead, the students created an augmented reality (AR) monocular to allow the user to trim hedges at the same time as keeping an eye on the thermal camera feed. Further work involved testing a binocular AR headset, as well as a VR headset. The AR setups proved most useful as they allowed for better situational awareness while working.
It’s a creative solution to protecting the local birdlife, and is to be applauded. There’s plenty of hubris around potential uses for augmented reality, but this is a great example of a real and practical one. And, if you’re keen to experiment with AR yourself, note that it doesn’t have to break the bank either!
In our ceaseless quest to bring you the best from the cheaper end of the global electronics markets, there are sometimes gadgets that we keep an eye on for a while because when they appear they’re just a little bit too pricey to consider cheap.
Today’s subject is just such a device, it’s a minimalist infra-red camera using the 8 pixel by 8 pixel Panasonic AMG8833 thermal sensor. This part has been around for a while, but even though any camera using it has orders of magnitude less performance than more accomplished models it has remained a little too expensive for a casual purchase. Indeed, these mini cameras were somewhere above £50 ($70) when they first came to our attention, but have now dropped to the point at which they can be found for somewhere over £30 ($42). Thirty quid is cheap enough for a punt on a thermal camera, so off went the order to China and the expected grey parcel duly arrived.
The interface on this camera is about as simple as it gets.
It’s a little unit, 40 mm x 35 mm x 18 mm, constructed of two laser-cut pieces of black plastic held together by brass stand-offs that hold a PCB between them, and on the front is a cut-out for the sensor while on the rear is one for the 35mm OLED display.At the side on the PCB is a micro USB socket which serves only as a power supply. It’s fair to say that this is a tiny unit.
Applying power from a USB battery bank, the screen comes up with a square colour thermal picture and a colour to temperature calibration stripe to its left. The colours adapt to the range of temperatures visible to the sensor, and there is a crosshair in the centre of the picture for which the temperature in Celsius is displayed below the picture. It’s a very straightforward and intuitive interface that requires no instruction, which is handy because the device has none. Continue reading “Review: Mini AMG8833 Thermal Camera”→
A thermal camera is a tool I have been wanting to add to my workbench for quite a while, so when I learned about the tCam-Mini, a wireless thermal camera by Dan Julio, I placed an order. A thermal imager is a camera whose images represent temperatures, making it easy to see things like hot and cold spots, or read the temperature of any point within the camera’s view. The main (and most expensive) component of the tCam-Mini is the Lepton 3.5 sensor, which sits in a socket in the middle of the board. The sensor is sold separately, but the campaign made it available as an add-on.
Want to see how evenly a 3D printer’s heat bed is warming up, or check whether a hot plate is actually reflowing PCBs at the optimal temperature? How about just seeing how weird your pets would look if you had heat vision instead of normal eyes? A thermal imager like the tCam-mini is the tool for that, but it’s important to understand exactly how the tCam-mini works. While it may look like a webcam, it does not work like one.
When you buy a mass-market mobile phone, you’re making the decision to trust a long list of companies with your private data. While it’s difficult for any one consumer to fully audit even a single piece of consumer technology, there have been efforts to solve this problem to a degree. The Pinephone is one such example, with a focus on openness and allowing users to have full control over the hardware. [Martijn Braam] is a proud owner of such a device, and took advantage of this attitude to add a thermal imager to the handset.
The build is not a difficult one, thanks to the expansion-friendly nature of the Pinephone hardware. The rear of the phone sports six pogo pins carrying an I2C bus as well as power. [Martin] started by modifying the back cover of the phone with contacts to interface with the pogo pins. With this done, the MLX90640 thermal imager was attached to the case with double-sided tape and wired up to the interface.
Nowadays we often value the superb design of vintage technology. It is, therefore, laudable when a broken piece of old electronics is given a new purpose. These types of builds are exactly [Martin Mander’s] cup of tea as he confirmed by turning a 1979 Apollo microwave monitor into a thermal camera (video embedded below).
Intrigued by its unique design, [Martin Mander] picked up the original microwave monitor at a secondhand sale, although the device was not exactly in mint condition. Supposedly this type of detector was used to monitor the exposure of personnel to microwave radiation in an industrial environment.
After removing all the guts, he replaced them with a Raspberry Pi Zero W, Adafruit thermal camera, 1.3″ TFT display, and a USB battery pack. It is especially nice that [Martin Mander] was able to mount all the components without relying on 3D prints but instead, he hand-carved some custom panels and brackets from waste plastic.
The software is based on Python and automatically uploads the captured images to an Adafruit.IO dashboard. With 8 x 8 pixels the resolution of the sensor is not great but by using bicubic interpolation he was able to convert it to a 32 x 32 image which was enough to take some interesting pictures of his cat and other household items.
It is also worthwhile to check out some of [Martin Manders] other retro-tech mods like his cassette Pi IoT scroller.
was not exactly in mint condition. Supposedly this type of detector was used to monitor the exposure of personnel to microwave radiation in an industrial environment.
