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Caterpillar offers phone with built-in FLIR camera

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Re: Caterpillar offers phone with built-in FLIR camera

#81

Post by Fatnino »

legitster wrote: post #72
motohagiography wrote: post #64

The lack of a replacable battery is infuriating because it's planned obselescence of a FLIR device. I got one of the first CAT s60 phones when they came out and tolerated all the android spyware on it because I really liked having a properly ruggedized phone. Got about 4 years out of it. The flir camera I would say I used most often at night for finding my dogs poop to pick up on neighbours lawns in the dark, but I u…

All things considered, 4 years is pretty good! Someone explained to me it's more of a supply chain thing than planned obsolescence. Phone technology and batteries specifically have pretty short production lives - keeping a battery in production and in stock for long periods of time can be crippling to your product line when the competitors come out with 10% denser batteries every year.

So sell compatible size higher density batteries.

Actual disposable batteries (remember those?) have improved dramatically over the decades but you can still put a brand new AA battery loaded with the latest 2022 tech into a remote control from the 50s and expect it to work.

Re: Caterpillar offers phone with built-in FLIR camera

#83

Post by yalogin »

Wow the first of these phones were made in 2013! This is the first I am hearing of this phone. These are obviously selling enough to keep churning out newer versions. The FLIR camera is also something I have never thought about, quite a good option to have some times.

Re: Caterpillar offers phone with built-in FLIR camera

#84

Post by tshadley »

FrostKiwi wrote: post #77

Anyone know the resolution of the FLIR camera? Specs don't seem to list the thermal camera resolution, only up-res one. The last revision was kind of weak, low-res with a max of only 120°C or so, if memory serves right. The improvement to : -20°C to 400°C is a happy step forward.

Says "FLIR Lepton 3.5 professional-grade sensor" which lists at 160x120 from

https://www.flir.com/news-center/camera-cores--components/fl...

Re: Caterpillar offers phone with built-in FLIR camera

#85

Post by [deleted] »

FrostKiwi wrote: post #77

Anyone know the resolution of the FLIR camera? Specs don't seem to list the thermal camera resolution, only up-res one. The last revision was kind of weak, low-res with a max of only 120°C or so, if memory serves right. The improvement to : -20°C to 400°C is a happy step forward.

[deleted]

Re: Caterpillar offers phone with built-in FLIR camera

#86

Post by randomdata »

rippercushions wrote: post #76
randomdata wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Seasons are a lousy way of describing times Given the context, 'spring' is just another way of saying second quarter. It has nothing to do with seasons beyond incidental alignment between calendar quarters and observed seasons in certain geographic areas where the use originated. Indeed, even second quarter breaks down where the Gregorian calendar isn't used, but you have to make assumptions at some point in order…

No, it really isn't, and it's mildly obnoxious to people living in the southern hemisphere (or the tropics, for that matter) when people assume spring = Q2. Mildly because we're used to it, but it's not hard to avoid. And for better or worse, the Gregorian calendar is the universal civil system now, even in the countries like Saudi Arabia that notionally use other calendars. Even Korean Juche years, Japanese imperial…

Usage dictates that spring = Q2 when used in a business context centred around a US-based business. It has nothing to do with the seasons. It is quite common for words to have multiple meanings, using context to establish the exact definition in play.

The only thing that is actually obnoxious is silly pedantry.

Re: Caterpillar offers phone with built-in FLIR camera

#87

Post by CamperBob2 »

jamal-kumar wrote: post #80

I'm thinking the next scientific instrument turned phone accessory is going to be raman spectroscopes. It could easily solve a lot of problems of things like adulterated food and drugs being so common. There's also research done that shows that many regular consumer phones on the market now have CCDs which are even sensitive enough as-is to read the laser reflection and sort out what the chemical is. There's an imple…

Note that that's not a Raman spectrometer, just a conventional grating or prism-based instrument. 3 nm resolution isn't too bad, though. Could be good for evaluating aquarium/houseplant lighting and things like that.

A Raman spectrometer is still a fairly exotic piece of hardware, requiring a laser, a notch filter for the laser's wavelength, and a very good conventional spectrophotometer to look for low-level sidebands. There have been some homebrew Raman implementations -- e.g., Ben Krasnow's at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRrOdKW06sk -- but nothing that would fit on the back of a smartphone.

Re: Caterpillar offers phone with built-in FLIR camera

#89

Post by SideQuark »

Fatnino wrote: post #81
legitster wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All things considered, 4 years is pretty good! Someone explained to me it's more of a supply chain thing than planned obsolescence. Phone technology and batteries specifically have pretty short production lives - keeping a battery in production and in stock for long periods of time can be crippling to your product line when the competitors come out with 10% denser batteries every year.

So sell compatible size higher density batteries. Actual disposable batteries (remember those?) have improved dramatically over the decades but you can still put a brand new AA battery loaded with the latest 2022 tech into a remote control from the 50s and expect it to work.

>Actual disposable batteries

they have the same form factor, and they have not changed much over decades in capability and certainly not size.

Phone batteries do not do this - they are designed to fit in a certain (few) phones, and market change on phone sizes mean there is no standard size.

When phone batteries get higher density, then it's likely a readeoff between adding more other features and keeping the same battery size - and as other features change, so do battery needs. The rapid evolution of phone tech, in every aspect, makes it cheaper (and wiser) to re-eval each piece quickly, or you get beat in the market place.

Maybe in decades this will settle down, like it took for the disposable batteries to standardize over decades...

Re: Caterpillar offers phone with built-in FLIR camera

#90

Post by coder543 »

motohagiography wrote: post #64

The lack of a replacable battery is infuriating because it's planned obselescence of a FLIR device. I got one of the first CAT s60 phones when they came out and tolerated all the android spyware on it because I really liked having a properly ruggedized phone. Got about 4 years out of it. The flir camera I would say I used most often at night for finding my dogs poop to pick up on neighbours lawns in the dark, but I u…

I don't understand why everyone is acting like replacement batteries are unavailable.

Here's an amazon link to a variety of options:

https://www.amazon.com/CAT-S60-Cell-Phone-Replacement-Batter...

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