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DIY thermal vision shoots 360° panoramas

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31–37 of 37 posts

Re: DIY thermal vision shoots 360° panoramas

#31
post #3

An alternative is the 8x8 Grid-EYE from Panasonic, costs around £30. The Melexis equivalent is a 16x4 which costs about the same. Note you'll need to fill in a fairly lengthy export/release form to get hold of the Grid-EYE sensors. I haven't had any problems ordering them from Farnell, just tell them what your project is. Both are fairly easy to talk to over I2C. You can make a passable wireless (low-res) thermal cam…

Or Flir Lepton. A bit more pricey (~$200), but image quality (wrt. noise) and resolution (80x60) are much higher.

Re: DIY thermal vision shoots 360° panoramas

#32
post #3

An alternative is the 8x8 Grid-EYE from Panasonic, costs around £30. The Melexis equivalent is a 16x4 which costs about the same. Note you'll need to fill in a fairly lengthy export/release form to get hold of the Grid-EYE sensors. I haven't had any problems ordering them from Farnell, just tell them what your project is. Both are fairly easy to talk to over I2C. You can make a passable wireless (low-res) thermal cam…

I used the Melexis MLX90260/MLX90261 back in December 2014 for some sensors research at work, and they were not very helpful and the documentation was appallingly ambiguous for important parts of the programming; plus, it offloads all the mathematics (not insignificant amounts of floating point and statistics) to your processor (not a good deal for embedded work). The output, once processed, though, was very accurate and provided for additional processing to make more use of the information than similar offerings.

The Panasonic Grid-Eye offering was much easier to use, and did not require additional processing power just to make use of the information.

Re: DIY thermal vision shoots 360° panoramas

#34
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it's a puny Arduino based one though. Look at the heat sinks. Don't waste your money - unless you really need the space the best ones are the ones that look like this: http://www.leadshine.com/series.aspx?type=products&category=... 100 times better and they're not even any more expensive - $31 on aliexpress.

Wouldn't something like this be sufficient in many cases? https://www.pololu.com/product/1182

It would depend on the amperage of the steppers involved, but sure - though I'm partial to the DRV8825 - it's considered a better driver in the 3d printer realm.

Re: DIY thermal vision shoots 360° panoramas

#35
When I read IR in the post, I thought, "well that's not thermal, is it?" and the thought was incorrect. FLIR's page [1] has a more understandable to me summary than StackExchange [2]. Also interesting is how lensing works with radiation in the IR spectrum [3].

Thermal cameras cannot use regular glass lenses, as glass will reflect thermal radiation rather than allowing the radiation to pass through the lenses. Commonly used materials for thermal lenses are Germanium (Ge), Chalcogenide glass, Zinc Selenide (ZnSe) and Zinc Sulfide (ZnS).

1. http://www.flir.com/cvs/americas/en/view/?id=30052 2. https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/6869/what-is-the... 3. https://www.axis.com/fi/en/learning/web-articles/technical-g...

Re: DIY thermal vision shoots 360° panoramas

#36
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it's a puny Arduino based one though. Look at the heat sinks. Don't waste your money - unless you really need the space the best ones are the ones that look like this: http://www.leadshine.com/series.aspx?type=products&category=... 100 times better and they're not even any more expensive - $31 on aliexpress.

Wouldn't something like this be sufficient in many cases? https://www.pololu.com/product/1182

Only for the tiniest of steppers. So basically no.

In my experience you can judge a stepper driver by the size of its heat sink.

Re: DIY thermal vision shoots 360° panoramas

#37
post #3

An alternative is the 8x8 Grid-EYE from Panasonic, costs around £30. The Melexis equivalent is a 16x4 which costs about the same. Note you'll need to fill in a fairly lengthy export/release form to get hold of the Grid-EYE sensors. I haven't had any problems ordering them from Farnell, just tell them what your project is. Both are fairly easy to talk to over I2C. You can make a passable wireless (low-res) thermal cam…

I used the Melexis MLX90260/MLX90261 back in December 2014 for some sensors research at work, and they were not very helpful and the documentation was appallingly ambiguous for important parts of the programming; plus, it offloads all the mathematics (not insignificant amounts of floating point and statistics) to your processor (not a good deal for embedded work). The output, once processed, though, was very accurate…

I've used their single point IR sensor before, just had a look at the documentation for the 16x4 - holy hell that's a lot of steps just to get a calibrated sensor reading! Do they provide a C library for it, or are you expected to write and test your own?
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