Why do I have these?
Working on circuit design I have to consider the power and components - which work within specified temperature ranges. A thermal camera is extremely useful for testing and confirming which components get how hot under load, etc. Even things like the thickness of PCB tracks can matter. So that is why I have one.
I am currently working on a new regulator design for my boards, one that allows 2A at 3.3V. I do not need that much for any of the simple designs, but some have a lot more peripherals, and some have 3.3V power pads to connect and power other devices from the board, so making a generic 2A capable design - this means testing under load. One of my first test boards has an underrated diode which is getting hot under high load, and highlighted my error. I don't have the full picture yet as I am awaiting the macro lens (a nice feature of the Hikmicro camera).
Gripes!
The biggest annoyance is that thermal cameras are all very low resolution (or alternatively very very expensive). For example, the Fluke is 120 x 90 pixels (really). The Hikmicro is 256 x 192. But I guess this is a limitation of the technology, and we have to live with it. Compared to the normal cameras I have this is quite an amazingly low resolution.
Tell us the resolution!
One of the biggest gripes is so many devices do not say the resolution. Many say the screen resolution. They will also say the normal camera resolution, but the IR camera resolution is buried in the small print if at all. Some are even more devious, saying the enhanced IR resolution which is actually upscaled from a lower resolution sensor. Please just own up and make clear the specification.
Transferring files
Another gripe is some cameras (notably the Fluke) make it really hard to just get the images. It had WiFi and even a dedicated send button, but that only worked if you have a cloud account and only sends to the cloud and you then have to log in to get the images. Maddening.
The Hikmicro seems to be saner. It has an app, and WiFi, but also has simple USB bulk storage to allow direct access to the images and videos (yes it does video too 25Hz). So at least that is sorted.
Show us the image
The image stored is a fucking screenshot! I mean literally, it is the screen with any image blending and overlayed text and icons and scaled to the screen size. This was the same on both the Fluke and Hikmicro. And is just really annoying. The Hikmicro has an option to also save the visible image separately but no option to save the clean IR image.
On the Hikmicro it even removes the [MENU] overlay to take the screenshot and puts it back afterwards!
Why why why? The IR is low enough resolution, why lose loads of pixels covering with a colour scale and overlay text. I mean I can just about see the logic of a marker for a temperature point (optionally), and the hikmicro does make it optional but if not set you don't get the temperature reading at all!
But why not save the IR image clean, in a larger image with the colour scale and text overlays all off to the side (and ideally in some meta data too). This is simple in software, and there really is no reason not to do that.
The other annoyance is it saves in jpeg, a lossy format. FFS this is such low resolution there is no reason not to use a lossless format - just use png even.
If the camera had an option to also save the clean IR image, that would be good enough, but it does not seem to have a way to do that.
More
The macro lens has arrived, and it excellent, but IR only (blocks visual), which was a surprise. Even so, the results are impressive, and useful.
Infrared cameras are ITAR regulated. IR cameras above a certain resolution/framerate need export licenses from the US, so I expect producers in other countries to follow similar rules.
ReplyDeleteAnd those parameters haven't been updated in years or the risk estimate hasn't changed at all, so they look really bad compared to current visible light camera sensors.