FLIR product

On Sun, 23 Aug 2015 10:06:05 -0500, amdx Gave us:

What they do not tell you is that an actual FLIR imaging handheld will BT into your laptop or tablet and provides far more information from the raw data it 'sees'. And they are only about $300 from the right source.

I just got one for the lab last week, in fact. Opted against the cellphone gadget thingy.

On Sun, 23 Aug 2015 11:38:34 -0400, DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno Gave us:

The other reason the handheld is better is because you can plug in your own, dedicated micro SD memory to save imagery to.

You might be amused at their suggested applications: Kinda looks like a consumer oriented device.

indeed

I've got a sheet of thermochromic material that cycles through most of its colours at skin temp. I wonder how huge a lens I'd need to get it to image IR.

NT

I did exactly that with a pin hole lens. It didn't work very well. I scribbled something about it a few years ago. Googling... I made some photos of the blurred images, but can't find them right now.

I also tried building a thermal imager using a hacked supermarket bar code scanner, which also didn't quite work. I can't find the link where I described that failure. Basically, the response time of the IR photo detector was so slow that it would have taken an hour to produce an image.

My next failure was going to be a storage oscilloscope, using a DVD writer laser head: but I wisely decided to do something else instead.

I also speculated on what it would take to build a contrivance that would allow me to "see" at RF frequencies. I estimated that it would need to be only 400,000 times the diameter of the human eyeball to work at 1GHz.

If you need any more ideas that don't work, please feel free to ask.

details details

I think my first sizeable oops was a mechanical scan TV camera that split the incoming light beam with a prism and shone it onto a row of ORP12s. Which were orders of magnitude too slow at such low light levels. And I vaguely remember drifted like mad.

NT

On Sun, 23 Aug 2015 15:15:57 -0700 (PDT), snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com Gave us:

You long line length retards are so stupid. This is Usenet! 73 characters, putz!

Fisher Price had a "video camera" that recorded onto audio cassette tapes and properly filtered could see in the IR. That was back in 1987 and it was about $150. Probably one of the most expensive 'toys' they made at the time.

Care to include some actual useful information like the model number and the location of the "right source"???

Cadmium sulfide cells are not suitable for your purpose: They're really slow: "Dark Resistance ... 15 seconds after removal of test light". and they will drift: "Cells light adapted at 30 to 50F for 16 hrs minimum prior to electrical tests".

Keep trying.

On Sun, 23 Aug 2015 17:52:01 -0700, mike Gave us:

The TG 165

Turns out it is lower res (from the specs) but has more processing, and you can even get an NIST traceable unit, but those are way more.

I'm not going back to a project I did decades ago :)

NT

fwiw I was at school then, trying to find a cheap alternative to vacuum state cameras.

NT

On Tue, 25 Aug 2015 16:13:50 -0700 (PDT), snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com Gave us:

In '87 I worked at an IR thermometry company and we had IR 'cameras' that were 4 frames per second and needed LN2 cooling cavities topped off in them, and they were $35k for the standard unit and $90k for the circuit board microscopy job.

This was in the days of the 286 and the 386 was just coming out, and we could not even get these things to offload to even a VHS outfit for storage.

Nobody today should be pissing and moaning about any gear that is less than $10k, and they are jam packed with features we never had in the past.

I've gone back and raised the dead. I've been dragged back to old projects and employers long after I've left and gone on to other things. When I left, I knew the companies would toss my project notebooks and ring binders, so I asked if I could keep them for "reference". That has been a very profitable exercise, especially for making minor component adjustments as the major IC specs drift around in production. I think the longest was getting called by the customers to rebuild a test fixture for a direction finder, 20 years after I helped with the design.

One of the problems with engineers is that we don't know when to stop engineering. I have the disease. Engineering keeps making changes (allegedly improvements) right up to the deadline. It often requires violence to get the product out of engineering. My problem is that I always have a better idea AFTER the product is in manufacturing and being produced. That's inevitable because improved devices and methods are constantly becoming available. Much of what I did 30+ years ago, I could do better today with less than 1/10th the cost, size, power consumption, sensitivity, etc.

In order to graduate from college, students were required to design, build, and document something electronic that actually worked. Since I was already in the 2way radio biz, I chose to replace a mechanical abomination called a "Secode Selector" with an electronic version: In the late 1960's, that meant RTL and DCL logic. My project barely worked. I suspect that I graduated college mostly because the skool wanted to get rid of me and not on the merits of my design. About 5 years later, better chips had arrived and I had gained some practical experience. I redesigned the device, built it, and it worked. Just one problem. The Secode system of dialing mobile phone numbers was by then completely obsolete and replaced by IMTS. Over the years, I've thought of ways to improve the design, but fortunately had the good sense not to waste time on it. Suffice to say that old projects don't really disappear.

Hint: Don't burn your bridges behind you.

Yup, its easy to forget that for some customers the kit is still viable dec ades later, even though the technology has moved far ahead. And at some poi nt someone will need to do something with it.

I think that's what finished off Abner Doble and his E series cars. Genius designs, but he changed every single one rather than producing a number the n introducing a new model. That drove his costs up badly, effectively all t he E series were handbuilt prototypes. (If you're not familiar with them, J ay Leno has a couple of youtube vids.)

Occasionally they really do, and my attempted camera was one such. What use is a mechanical camera in the days of cheap >10 megapixel sensors. At the time the idea made sense, now it's totally superseded.

It has been interesting revisiting some old stuff for this 3rd world projec t. Seeing how I'd do it differently today, how the issues can be solved or costs cut further. And seeing how what I thought of pushing the boundaries is standard practice now, like overrunning components and compact construct ion techniques.

NT

That's probably true for visible light and near-IR system. IR (heat) micro-bolometer imagers have fewer pixels, currently about 1024x768 pixels.

I do (or rather did) RF. The same ancient flying spot technology that runs mechanical optical scanners works nicely for direction finding, ELINT, and threat detection. I've done doppler type direction finders[1], which conveniently have no moving parts. In my never humble opinion, rotating antenna direction finders are generally better, except for speed and size. Anyway, what you learned building a mechanical scanning imager, could have easily been applied to adjacent technologies.

I've only done one product for a "3rd world" customer. A major objective, after low cost, was that it needed to be sufficiently reliable that it could survive in a low tech culture. Repair and spare parts were deemed an impossibility. So, it had to be (literally) bulletproof. I think you'll find that extremely simple designs work better than high tech, even though the performance specs will probably be worse.

I think the main thing I learnt was an engineering lesson. Check the spec s heets carefully, and realise that specs are optimistic & interdependant. OR P12s respond fast enough with enough light, but as I found, on a third of a pixel they're orders of magnitude slower.

Performance specs haven't had much of a look-in on most of the projects. In most cases if it works, it can be made from minimal junk parts and its ver y energy efficient its good. Quite the opposite to your products, its all a bout how can I get this function done in the cheapest possible way, how can one eliminate the costs that appear to be inevitable. Battery holders cost money, reusing scrap ones doesn't work well enough so I came up with a car dboard one. Crystals cost money so why not use the mains electromagnetic fi eld as a frequency reference and so on. It's quite a change from what I use d to design. I'm grateful that I have the resources to be able to do it.

NT