A useful instrument to have

Great minds think alike, Jan. ;) I bought one of these (but not this

exact model) only last week for diagnostic purposes and it is indeed very

useful. I got it primarily for electronics troubleshooting but it's also

helped me detect one of the brake calipers on my car was slightly

binding. One of those gadgets you now wonder how you managed without!

Hang on... raspberries??

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On a sunny day (Sun, 24 Sep 2017 09:53:25 -0000 (UTC)) it happened Cursitor

Doom wrote in :

Raspberries like this:

Those work together to display data via internet like this:

that is a screenshot of an app I wrote to monitor the data remotely.

The first raspi receives AIS ship data,

the second receives uses 'dump1090' to receive airplane data, the receiver is outside view in that picture, but also based on a DVB-T stick.

The airplane data can in principle be used for a drone collision avoidance system,

was it not that the mil planes here do not send their position, need radar for that,

but I found my IR camera can see them at night.

Did you make any money from that??

Good thing you are not working for ISIS :-)

Cheers

Klaus

They aren't the only flying things without Mode-S; Mode-S

requires significant power, and many aerial vehicles don't

have sufficient power.

Those IR thermometers are great fun. Once you have one,

you keep finding more uses for it. Hotspots in radators

are one; presumably you could also use them to spot

where heat insulation is poor,

That crossed my mind when he vanished for a few months...

Air?

Welcome back.

The laser pointer is usually misaligned on the cheap IR thermometers

anyway. With an 8:1 beamwidth, the "spot" covers quite a large area

at any distance. Flying from a drone, you're probably measuring the

average temperature of everything in the room. The more expensive

You might want to dig out a more accurate thermocouple thermal probe

that plugs into a DVM and compare readings. You'll find that

reflections, emissivity, IR transparency, can all have a large effect

on the measurement. For example, try to measure the temperature of a

mirror or sheet of reflective aluminum foil.

"How to Get Great Results with an Infrared Thermometer"

"My infrared thermometer isn't as accurate as a contact thermometer

would be."

No, that's not the idea. It's what we call a 'poison pill' which makes

aggregating sites like Homeowner's Hub or Electronics Related for example

(which leach off the contributions of others' made freely on Usenet)

unattractive to potential investors and advertisers. Hopefully it'll

catch on.

I have a brass light fixture that is way too hot to touch, but an IR

thermometer reports room temperature.

Well, that was when it used an incandescent bulb.

Stick a piece of kapton tape on the brass and read that with the IR

thermometer.

On a sunny day (Sun, 24 Sep 2017 09:09:51 -0700) it happened Jeff Liebermann

wrote in :

I used it for the opposite,

I have the drone on 15 m or so RG178 coax, a 2 MOSFET power converter sends 100 kHz a few hundred Vpp up via the coax cable (outside everything).

At the drone side a ferrite ringcore with 2 power Schottky diodes and some high ripple current caps brings it down to 10A 7.5 V for the drone motor and electronics.

Unlimited flight time (tested to 30 minutes now, more when it is dry weather for a while).

I needed the temperature meter to get the diode and ringcore temperature when the drone hovers at about 2 m altitude, so I can get close without the propellers

hitting my fingers (has happened, bloody mess).

I designed and build a small 162 MHz to some other frequency converter to re-transmit the AIS (ship) signals received by the drone,

and the whole thing functions then as a higher altitude antenna (later will send the RF over the coax too).

Of course a balloon is simpler, but the drone is GPS stabilized.

Maximum altitude is set by the weight of coax it can lift.

The lipo battery is in the drone too, in case of power failure of the ground station it will, when batteries go empty, slowly auto-land where it started.

Later maybe I will try ATV from it, I have a slim-jim antenna piece of TV lint cable for both 70 cm and the 162 MHz.

Experiments enough.

I can monitor drone battery voltage from the remote, maybe I will couple it to a 'charge stop' circuit to stop the power upload if the lipo is full.

Most of that soft is already written and tested on my site:

the 'dancing drone' software has been rewritten but needs testing again.

There is more... site needs updating with that power stuff, if you want pictures i already have those (were uploaded to rc group).

I did find that site, am an avid Bing user now that I boycott google

I've been meaning to get that for some time now, from AliExpress

of course. It's not practicable for me to get it from eBay.com

and it costs twice as much at eBay India.

Your post was the final push. At the moment I have about 20 items

still en route from AliExpress and I've suspended placing more

orders until they're delivered. I'm gonna order the thermometer

as soon as I've received most of those previous orders.

I've been having fun too with a laser distance meter I ordered

from AliExpress, at less than a quarter of the price of a Bosch

model with the same range. It's a 60m model but I've used it at

up to twice that range at night.

On a sunny day (Sun, 24 Sep 2017 16:41:10 -0000 (UTC)) it happened Cursitor

Doom wrote in :

Oh well, I always am happy when some of my ideas are copied,

China did it a few times now.

When I want to be richer I will play the stockmarket again...

Open source...

Do not want all those legal fights, total waste of time.

Shhh!.... Don't give them ideas.

Same here. I've had some of my ideas copied by Indian companies,

some of them down to the PCB design and physical mounts.

I don't publish my designs anywhere, so the copyings must have

been done from actual products.

On a sunny day (Sun, 24 Sep 2017 23:24:18 +0530) it happened Pimpom

wrote in :

It is the normal, back in the sixties a few engineers from a big public company

('Royal' in the name too) came to us and put something on the table:

Can you make this?

Well, can we look inside?

Sure, (had a look, hey what it this, this transistor, this is this...), 'OK we can make something like that'.

They needed competition to drive the price down I guess, needed a second source too.

My boss later did the same, can you make something like this?

What about patents?

Well make it a bit different...

Apple is now making its own graphics chips, that other company was just sold for about 500 million after stock price dropped by half or something.

Where did Apple get the design from?

Self driving cars... same.

Be glad it was only your fingers.

"A toddler has lost an eye after being hit in the face by a drone

which flew out of control. Oscar Webb, 18 months, was in the garden

when his eyeball was sliced by the propeller. It was being flown

by family friend Simon Evans who had experience of flying the

remote-controlled device."

Graphic picture:

Electrically driven props on RC aircraft have the nasty

attribute of hurting more than those driven by the old petrol

engines. When electric motors stall the torque increases,

unlike petrol engines.

You raise a good point. Assuming that software is needed in the product, is

it possible to encrypt some data or part of a program in a chip that blows a

link or something similar so the data cannot be copied?

Now, counterfeiters can copy the pcb, but they can't make it run.

I believe there are chips that offer unbreakable encryption to transfer

programs to a microprocessor. And some chips have a bit you can set to

prevent dumping memory. How effective are these?