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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

#91

Post by mongol »

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.

Imagine a smartphone designed to use AAA batteries. That would be something. Would be cool to see.

Re: Caterpillar offers phone with built-in FLIR camera

#93

Post by zwieback »

tshadley wrote: post #84
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...

I've played around with both generations of the Lepton sensor and the 3.5 is really nice: factory calibrated so you can directly measure temp without elaborate external calibration and a built-in shutter.

Thermal sensors of this type are huge and expensive. At work I also have a Flir with 1024x768 sensor, super expensive with a massive germanium (or something) lens. One of the problems for handheld applications is that you always need two separate optical paths since the lensing is totally incompatible. So you end up having to register the two images to each other, which can fail when it's darkish or the image doesn't have a lot of edges.

Re: Caterpillar offers phone with built-in FLIR camera

#94

Post by programmer_dude »

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…

A veritable tricoder in the making! Interesting times ahead.

Re: Caterpillar offers phone with built-in FLIR camera

#95

Post by zwieback »

WatchDog wrote: post #88

When will we see high resolution (say 1080p) FLIR cameras at a prosumer level price point ~$1,000?

Probably not for a long time. The individual microbolometer pixels are huge and use an expensive process so just the size of the sensor and the effort of getting reasonable yield is enormous.

Re: Caterpillar offers phone with built-in FLIR camera

#97

Post by walterbell »

asddubs wrote: post #49
tildef wrote: post #11

I used the S62 as a daily driver for a couple of years and it was fairly decent. The convenience of having a thermal camera in your pocket at all times was remarkable, and it's one of those things you kind of miss when it's gone (my daily use for it was checking if the coffee was cool enough to drink--yes, I know my tasting organs provide much of the same functionality...) However, the resolution of the thermal camer…

the 9 FPS I believe are because US manufacturers aren't allowed to export thermal cameras above 9 FPS

Imported 25 FPS thermal cameras are sold in US.

Re: Caterpillar offers phone with built-in FLIR camera

#98

Post by MBO35711 »

randomdata wrote: post #86
rippercushions wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not so. I would have guessed it was either Feb,Mar,Apr (astronomical) or Mar, Apr, May being the gardeners calendar. But Q2 is Q2. It's not just having to flip the season for the hemisphere.

Re: Caterpillar offers phone with built-in FLIR camera

#99

Post by graderjs »

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…

FLIR camera should also be able to pick up some UFO/UAP in the skies as well. Yay! Now nearly everyone can see some.

Re: Caterpillar offers phone with built-in FLIR camera

#100

Post by Ao7bei3s »

nomel wrote: post #68
anigbrowl wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if it's possible to take multiple low-res cameras and combine their output in an array...mainly because I have a source for affordable but very low-res (32x24) thermal cameras.

You could make a sensor array by placing the raw sensors close together, all on the same image plan of a single lens. This results in gaps between that would have to be dealt with. Or, you could make a camera array, with multiple lenses, like: https://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/array

For a real-world application: the ARGUS video capture system used on MQ-9 Reaper drones is 386 5-megapixel, 2010's-era smartphone grade camera sensors and four lenses (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_Stare)
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