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The FLIR One, a heat camera for the iPhone, is now available

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Re: The FLIR One, a heat camera for the iPhone, is now available

#51

Post by jacquesm »

drazvan wrote: post #49
jacquesm wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$999 is a bit pricey I think. You can buy a pro-sumer device for that money: http://www.testequipmentdepot.com/flir/e-series/e4.htm

Well, the Opgal device has a resolution of 384 x 288 while the E4 lists 80x60. It's probably worth the asking price.

That's a good point. I wonder how much you could coax out of a regular camera by putting an IR pass filter in front of it to filter out all the other wavelengths and then using a long exposure.

That might be a dirt cheap way to get a passable IR cam.

Re: The FLIR One, a heat camera for the iPhone, is now available

#52

Post by CamperBob2 »

micampe wrote: post #39
CamperBob2 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worse than that, most likely. The cheapest FLIR cameras have 320x240 IR sensors, but they downsample to 80x60 unless you either pony up several thousand dollars for the E8 model or buy a $1000 E4 and hack it. There's no way they're enabling 320x240 IR imaging in a $350 iPhone peripheral. If they were, they'd be trumpeting it all over their marketing literature, rather than neglecting to mention resolution at all…

Pick one: either it is a cheesy gimmick or it makes the sensor vastly more useful. Those are pretty much opposites, it can't be both.

MSX is a band-aid to cover up low resolution IR. With 80x60 IR, MSX is a useful feature, because without it you often can't tell what you're looking at. But with 320x240 IR it's not needed in most cases. Worse, because the IR and visual lenses aren't coaxial, the resulting parallax error tends to actively deceive you about the exact location of small hot spots.

If FLIR didn't go out of their way to cripple the 320x240 sensors in their low-end models, MSX wouldn't be worth incorporating at all.

Re: The FLIR One, a heat camera for the iPhone, is now available

#53

Post by CamperBob2 »

readerrrr wrote: post #40
lunixbochs wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't tested that exactly yet, but here's a support response I got from FLIR on temperature accuracy: > At about 100m, you can see the heat signature of a person. However, atmospheric conditions can influence the visible range. Dry, clear weather will provide a greater range than rainy, foggy or humid conditions as water in the atmosphere can absorb infrared radiation before reaching the sensor. > The spot temper…

That seems like a lot of variance. I would like my thermometer to be accurate to at least 1°.

IR imaging isn't the best technique when you need extremely high accuracy. The reason is that you usually don't know the emissivity of the surface that precisely, or for that matter its reflectivity.

The sensor is capable of good resolution, accuracy, and repeatability, but it doesn't always tell you what you assume it's telling you. People who use these things professionally usually need to take courses on how to interpret the results.

Re: The FLIR One, a heat camera for the iPhone, is now available

#55

Post by CamperBob2 »

jacquesm wrote: post #51
drazvan wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the Opgal device has a resolution of 384 x 288 while the E4 lists 80x60. It's probably worth the asking price.

That's a good point. I wonder how much you could coax out of a regular camera by putting an IR pass filter in front of it to filter out all the other wavelengths and then using a long exposure. That might be a dirt cheap way to get a passable IR cam.

You can see some IR sources like remote-control IR LEDs with a conventional CCD camera, but you'd do it by removing its existing IR filter rather than adding one. The IR cameras being discussed here respond to much longer wavelengths, though, and yield completely different results. The black-body spectrum for thermal IR has far too little energy at the frequencies that traditional CCD cameras are sensitive to.

Re: The FLIR One, a heat camera for the iPhone, is now available

#56

Post by CamperBob2 »

drazvan wrote: post #49
jacquesm wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$999 is a bit pricey I think. You can buy a pro-sumer device for that money: http://www.testequipmentdepot.com/flir/e-series/e4.htm

Well, the Opgal device has a resolution of 384 x 288 while the E4 lists 80x60. It's probably worth the asking price.

That's pretty nifty, and a much more elegant product design than FLIR's.

The E4 can be modified for 320x240 support (at least the older ones could, don't know if they've "fixed" this or not), but it sounds like Opgal's sensor is even better in that respect.

Re: The FLIR One, a heat camera for the iPhone, is now available

#57

Post by codezero »

lunixbochs wrote: post #28
codezero wrote: post #27

I used one of these at MacWorld, and asked the rep what distance it was effective at, their answer was less than 15 feet.

What do you mean by effective? FLIR's support told me it can pick up the heat signature of a person at 100 meters. I went outside earlier and it seemed alright at a long distance. It's not like it simply doesn't work after 15'. I think due to the resolution many of the interesting things you can do with it will end up being at short range. I also noticed it reports the sun's temperature as "> 212º F" so there's that.

I didn't get a quantitative definition of effective, I asked how far it would detect a heat signature, they said 15 feet. I'm sure it "works" at greater distance, the question is how much noise you get and how reliable it is at greater distances.

They had one on site and the reason I asked the range was because I held it up and looked and it seemed very very local. I'd be happy to see this thing produce a heat signature that you can identify as human at 100 yards, that isn't the same as a human's heat signature at 100 yards though.

Re: The FLIR One, a heat camera for the iPhone, is now available

#58

Post by eddyg »

Worth mentioning the "Affordable thermal imaging" Kickstarter project[1] which currently has about 14 days to go. The nice thing about this product is that it is not tied to a specific phone or tablet, is less expensive than the FLIR One, and you don't need to frequently close a "shutter" to re-calibrate to boot.

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1075169276/hemaimager-a...

Re: The FLIR One, a heat camera for the iPhone, is now available

#59

Post by frik »

omegant wrote: post #34
frik wrote: post #17

Interesting. As a FLIR camera used to be expensive, I built my own thermal IR camera for $120 (2011): http://oi60.tinypic.com/2820yg2.jpg

Do you have a tutorial?

Sorry, not at the moment. I am using an Arduino, two servo motors, a medical grade thermal IR sensor with a small point of view and a webcam, all connected to a notebook. Shooting a thermal picture takes up to 60sec, so it is not completely comparable with a IR-CMOS that FLIR cameras use, but a lot cheaper and the measured temperatures are more precise.

Re: The FLIR One, a heat camera for the iPhone, is now available

#60

Post by frik »

IshKebab wrote: post #43
omegant wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a tutorial?

Probably a scanning IR thermometer. Not really the same thing...

you are right, well almost. I am using not an IR thermometer, but medical grade IR sensor. But you can reuse an IR thermometer too (with a bit lower grade results).
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