Caterpillar's new smartphone with built-in thermal imaging | Hacker News Reader

Caterpillar's new smartphone with built-in thermal imaging

gizmodo.com

114 pointsuphoff63 comments

This is perhaps the first actually interesting sensor/add-on I've seen for a phone. I'm picturing myself running around the outside of my house looking for hot-spots to re-insulate and hence justify to my partner the purchase price of the device. Or hot electronic components. Or playing a TSA creep and looking for ill people on public transport. What fun! (I hope other manufacturer's race in to this market.)

Or vampires. It's gonna really suck for vampires once these are in iPhones. >:-[

but vampires can't have their pictures taken, so I have to assume they can't be sensed through a phone in any way whatsoever.

Room temperature on the FLIR or invisible on the regular camera, one way or another they're in the soup.

I have one of the Flir dongles (bought for work: I work with high-power LEDs) and I've gotten quite obsessive about looking for draughts and insulation gaps. It gives you spot temperatures on the screen too, which is really useful. Seeing the icy-blue draught pouring through the broken cat flap seal and pooling on the floor was a wake-up call.

There have been others for a while:

http://www.amazon.com/Seek-Compact-Thermal-Imager-Android/dp...

I bought a FLIR one for the iPhone; and it found an uninsulated section of wall in my house. The actual reason I purchased it was to help locate an under-slab leak. $250 to not break the wrong bit of concrete would be well worth it.

For the CAT phone, I think the bigger selling point is the ruggedness.

Would you have an Amazon link for the FLIR adapter you purchased for your iPhone?

It is called FLIR ONE: http://www.amazon.com/FLIR-ONE-Thermal-Imager-iOS/dp/B00VILV...

"I'm picturing myself running around the outside of my house looking for hot-spots to re-insulate and hence justify to my partner the purchase price of the device."

I just bought one of these last week to do exactly that http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0044R87BE

It is definitely not as cool as a FLIR device but at 1/10 the price, totally worth it.

Yet another tech toy I didn't know existed until 3 minutes ago but that I now desperately, desperately want to buy.

Edit: Also, not going to lie, my #1 use of the IR camera will be for real-time fart detection.

Google glass with FLIR is what you need, my friend.

My curiosity outweighs my hesitation: what do you plan to do in response upon detecting a fart in real-time? I'm picturing Nelson Muntz...

> Also, not going to lie, my #1 use of the IR camera will be for real-time fart detection.

The popular video of this is a fake.

For any makers out there, remember that FLIR sells a dev kit with their Lepton sensor (the one used in this phone). So if you are interested in IR applications you can create them yourself: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/13233

3GB RAM and Snapdragon Octa-core processor! Finally Caterpillar improves the specification of its smartphone. Its processing power is closer to ordinary consumer phones! In the past, I wondered why Caterpillar used weaker processor and less RAM than consumer phones. I believe people working in industrial area also need a powerful phone for their work. Am I right?

PS: I think 720p resolution on a 4.7" monitor is good enough. Acceptable for media consumption already.

Yeah, I'm amused by the idea that a 4.7" screen with nearly the same resolution as the 13" laptop I'm using right now is somehow insufficient for media.

But how will you watch 4K video streams on the go, when you don't have a 4K screen to admire the "Buffering…" notification?

I like your comment. But before you can load the buffering icon, you have run out of mobile data.

I think most users do not own a 4K monitor at home or in their companies. I am not sure if 4K recording/ decoding is useful in this period.

> I think most users do not own a 4K monitor at home or in their companies.

I've just migrated one of our offices from 17" 1280x1024 screens to handed down 24" 1920x1200 screens. The latter were replaced in another office with 25" 2560x1440 screens… 4K is just not cost effective right now.

Engineers are paid six figure salaries but you're not willing to spend $600 on a display?

If I have to staff several offices, $600 apiece quickly escalates.

And no, not engineers. Marketers.

I only just got my first proper HD monitor at home, and we have exactly one 4K monitor at work for compatibility testing.

Versions of Windows earlier than 10 do display scaling badly, so having a very high resolution monitor can be unusable.

Doesn't Windows 10 just add better scaling for multiple screens with different pixel densities? Normal high-dpi support was IMHO quite sufficient since Vista (of course, oftentimes depending on the application).

In 7 at least it's completely useless, because "depending on the application" means it works nowhere. Not even Windows' own UI is consistently scaled, never mind random third party applications.

In a lot of reliability-first applications at least one-two generation old hardware is used and simple designs mean you won't get cutting edge specs. Before they probably opted for proven reliability (proven in the sense of a well known failure rate) rather than first-to-consumer components.

I really like the design of that phone. There is a "mechanical" look and feel to it, very different to the usual glossy/flat high end phones of today. Anyone else feel the same way?

I would love to buy a flagship that looks like this. Similarly, I love the black, rugged look of thinkpads of yore. Nowadays everything is becoming shiny.

Thinkpads are still black bricks, though. Just fibre-reinforced plastic bricks instead of magnesium bricks.

I think so too. The design looks cool! I hope more consumer phones can provide this kind of design!

Yeah, absolutely.

I also love the idea of a phone where I can leave the physical design uncovered and on display. I would never, ever use a normal phone without a case--I'd be replacing them every 6 months--but a ruggedized phone wouldn't need one, if they're as good as they say.

idem! Definitely a refreshing look.

I recently heard that Panasonic released Toughpads. http://www.pcworld.com/article/3036176/phones/panasonic-anno...

But it's from Panasonic...

They have decades of experience in rugged computers, their toughbook laptops are the sturdiest commercial devices I know of (some videos on youtube are jawdropping)

This tablet torture test is insane. What a fun project that must have been.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id4Mvp316p8

It's cute but it's all kids play (althought the -4 to 140 step, and the pristine look at the end was cool).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0n6mX8Q1waA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bb2QexOTl4 (beware, high moronism)

That's a good thing.

Anyone old enough to remember how Sony's nightvision camcorders allowed people to see through some clothing?

All these new thermal devices are totally going to be abused for that.

Yup, already being done https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/tmpdnsytzm...

I don't really see through any clothing there..

Thermal can "see through" some dark clothing if the visible filter is removed from the camera (or negated by another filter) and the clothing is against the body releasing heat.

At least that's how the Sony hacked worked.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WU1BN0pSVi8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXAzZoWLzSo

So these cameras just need a small mod. But even without the mod, the right clothing will probably spark a very horrible subreddit someday soon.

I own the B15Q... a pity the new one doesn't come with a hackable Mediatek processor but a Snapdragon instead.

I hope that at least this time they manage to release the AOSP and kernel, which they didn't for the B15(Q)...

Someone had to do it. A social network for iPhone FLIR-one thermal videos. https://itunes.apple.com/app/id1042703406?ct=null&pt=null&mt.... Enjoy!

Cool product. Nextel back in the day showed that there's a market for rugged phones like this. I'm curious why the low resolution though, seems like the cpu should be fast enough to handle 1080p.

Here in the Netherlands the CAT branded phones are very popular among construction workers, even though they have low resolution screens, Android versions that are a couple of generations behind and (surprisingly) batteries that can't be replaced. Raw specs are not that important in this market.

I've worked in construction and I use a Nokia dumbphone. The reason for it is that I need to answer calls quickly while at work. So the phone has to be in a pocket close by. And it's likely that most pockets "close by" also have some sand in them.

Nobody has money to buy new iPhone every two months. But it's manageable to buy new dumbphone once a year.

Similarly I've been scrambling to keep finding new feature phones with rubber-sealed keypads for my dad (car mechanic).

Every seam is an invitation for steel dust, and touch screens are useless when you're wearing thick work gloves.

How about the Cat B100? http://www.catphones.com/en-gb/phones/b100

I've been considering getting myself one, not because of a dirty work but I'd like to have a phone that's usable with gloves on. And a battery life that is measured in weeks, not hours.

$100? Oof. It used to be that you could get $20 Nokias like that.

Yeah, it's a bit pricey but certainly a more rugged phone than a $20 dumbphone. I guess the question is: "will it last five times longer or be significantly better?" I haven't tried it.

They have a few models that are quite a lot cheaper than this, but with less battery life and other specs.

The non-replaceable battery is disappointing, but understandable: a removable battery cover is a seam that has to be water/dirt-proofed, and a point of failure when dropped.

Battery life. When you’re already above 300ppi (312ppi for this phone) it becomes progressively less noticeable to go up in resolution for a measurable hit to the battery life.

Apart from the obvious problems (more pixels = more GPU/CPU power needed), the more dense the screen, the less effective is the backlight: With a denser matrix, less light passes through the tinier cells, and you have to crank up raw backlight strength to compensate. And that is absolutely murderous for an outdoor phone that has to have a backlight as bright as possible, so you can read it in the sun.

This phone absolutely needs to last all day without recharging. Lower resolution displays draw less power and require less power to render to. 1280x720 is reasonable for 4.7": it's 316 ppi. Higher density only offers steeply diminishing returns in image quality, for sharply increased power consumption and a noticeable increase in cost.

Is it easily rootable? I wanted to buy the old cat phone but that stopped me.

What is the switch on the front for? 2M/5M?

The switch covers up ports, microphone(s) and speaker(s) and allows it to be waterproof up to 5 metres compared to 2 metres when the switch is set to 2M.

Misleading renders given the sensor is a Lepton. It has a resolution of 80x60 pixels.

> Misleading renders given the sensor is a Lepton. It has a resolution of 80x60 pixels.

The render might be demonstrating the hybrid mode?

"since [the 13 megapixel rear camera] sits right next to the smartphone’s thermal imaging Lepton sensor, the two can work together to create an enhanced hybrid image by merging live feeds from both cameras together. That was one of the most important innovations that FLIR introduced on the FLIR ONE, and it allowed those who weren’t familiar with thermal imaging to be able to easily decipher what they were looking at."

I'm not sure how the hybrid imaging works, though.

> I'm not sure how the hybrid imaging works, though.

They enlarge the very small thermal image and interpolate it, then they superimpose/merge that interpolated thermal image with the higher-res visible-spectrum image. I've worked with an older FLIR camera that did something like this (without explicitly telling) and took me a time to understand what was happening.

Woah, it's an inch thick!

> Woah, it's an inch thick!

It's thick, but not quite that thick: "The new CAT S60 measures in at just slightly thicker than half an inch"

That's not a Woah then. But they must've edited the article. It actually said "slightly thicker than an inch" when I was reading it earlier.

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