Heat cameras?

[Paul Andrews]

Hi,

I would very much like to get a heat camera. I have been developing a power supply and the thermal characteristics are quite important to me (efficiency and all that, plus no one wants their nixie clocks to catch on fire!). My finger isn't too bad, but is also a good insulator so it is a classic example of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle - or at least close: The act of trying to take a measurement affecting the very thing you are trying to measure. That and sometimes it gets burnt.

Trouble is they aren't cheap. Does anyone have any suggestions? I guess other options like a thermocouple would work at a push, but I would still like to own a heat camera if the price is right...

- Paul

[John Rehwinkel]

I would very much like to get a heat camera. I have been developing a power supply and the thermal characteristics are quite important to me (efficiency and all that, plus no one wants their nixie clocks to catch on fire!). My finger isn't too bad, but is also a good insulator so it is a classic example of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle - or at least close: The act of trying to take a measurement affecting the very thing you are trying to measure. That and sometimes it gets burnt.

Trouble is they aren't cheap. Does anyone have any suggestions? I guess other options like a thermocouple would work at a push, but I would still like to own a heat camera if the price is right...

$40 will buy you a useable low-resolution one at AdaFruit:

https://www.adafruit.com/product/3538

If that's still too much, an ordinary infrared thermometer is not really a "camera", but can be had quite cheaply from a number of vendors and does offer non-contact temperature measurement.

- John

[mike]

The phone add-ons from Seek and Flir are pretty useful and not very expensive

(Sent from phone)

[H. Carl Ott]

I had a Seek thermal module for my phone.  Worked fine. And reasonably priced.  

 An incredibly useful diagnostic tool for working around electronics. 

 After seeing just how useful, I upgraded to a hacked FLIR E4.

 I use it all the time.

   

carl
--------------------------------------------------------
Henry Carl Ott   N2RVQ    hcar...@gmail.com

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[严泽远]

I got a Flir E4 from eBay last month, second hand but pretty well, thermal resolution of E4 is 80x60 pixels but it's easily to hacking to 320x240 because E4 camera is equipped with the same 320x240 sensor as the E8 and it's simply software limited to 80x60.
It's a good tool for PCB trouble shooting.

-Yan.

在 2017年11月3日星期五 UTC+8下午9:52:27，Paul Andrews写道：

[Paul Andrews]

I ended up ordering a Seek compact pro from Amazon - I had a bunch of points I could use to bring the price down. I considered the Adafruit option, but I would need to spend more money on a display and it would be difficult to actually mount it in a useable way. Even second hand, the Flir 4 is more than I wanted to spend at this point in time.

So, we will see how useful the Seek is when it arrives!

Thanks everyone for all your suggestions.

[Nick]

I ended up buying a Keysight U5855A TrueIR imaging camera off HP on eBay in April - HP were selling a load which I believe were ex-classroom ones but refurbished and warrantied - got the heads-up from EEVBLOG - basically, you could make them a crazy offer (very small fraction of new price) and they'd accept it - they just wanted to shift them. Came with all cables etc. in heavy protective case too, i.e. the complete original package - mine doesn't appear to have been used - not a mark on it.

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/thermal-imaging/keysight-u5855a-trueir-thermal-imager/ 

Nick