The Hidden Worlds of the Klein Tools TI250 Thermal Imager | Hacker News Reader

The Hidden Worlds of the Klein Tools TI250 Thermal Imager

scottsmitelli.com

245 pointssmitelli73 comments

If you're looking for a more universally useful Klein tool to start your collection, they make a bottle opener with their signature handle.

As an added bonus, then you can confuse your mathematician friends by telling them you have a Klein bottle opener.

More practically, their screwdrivers are worlds better than average. The Phillips head tips are ground properly and are less likely to cam out when you don't want them to. They also make slotted drivers with a cabinet tip. They're sold at Home Depot (in the electrical aisle), so you don't have to hunt down an electrical distributor to get them.

I can 2nd a recommendation for their screwdrivers!

their diagonal cutters also remain really high quality, both the ones for #6 wire and the ones more suitable for #28

klein dikes are amazing.

I first picked up on them while working in a bike shop. mine kept going dull but my coworker had his klein forever and they still cut stranded derailleur and brake cable cleanly. I used to think dikes were awful due to the poor quality of generics but these are surely worth the $30-35.

https://www.kleintools.com/catalog/diagonal-cutting-pliers/d...

Other classic Klein tools that I'm aware of are the 11-in-1 screwdriver [1] and the linesman's pliers [2]. The linesman's have many uses including hammering down nails or staples or bashing through drywall. You'll see these tools in a lot of tradesman's bags.

The Wera screwdrivers are also very nice and noticeably better-performing than standard drivers.

[1] e.g., https://www.kleintools.com/catalog/multi-bit-nut-drivers/11-...

[2] e.g., https://www.kleintools.com/catalog/high-leverage-side-cuttin...

Those lineman's pliers are ubiquitous to the point where an electrician on a jobsite can say "hand me those Kleins" and everyone knows they mean the pliers.

Yup, when I put those in my pocket, then I'm in electrician mode. And if an electrician says his hammer, also means kleins.

the 11 in 1 screwdriver is so useful all around. hands down the best screwdriver to have if you only have one. (i got a full set of kleins many years ago as part of a barter exchange and have nothing but praise to give them)

the socket portion of the 11-in-1 screwdriver is really handy to use for a lot of the things like pc cases since those have a socket head that makes it really easy to screw (or also Phillips if you want). lots of screws have that 1/4" socket.

Yea, I used to be a electrician in local 6.

Their screwdrivers arn't as good as Snapon, but neither do they cost a fortune.

My standard commercial job tooling was a side cutter (Klein, or whatever I had at the time), a slotted screwdriver, wire stripper, and drywall knife.

I kept my tools in one pocket of my overalls. I learned pretty quick, I didn't need a bunch of tools to do most run of the mill office wiring.

My "Kleins" were used as a hammer.

Most union electricians really didn't even talk about the brand. They just used their tools.

(Tooling has gotten very good these days though. My days of paying more for a name brand in hand tools are over. I got one, actually two complaints while working on PacPell park. An architect complained to my shop boss over my use of the word "Dykes". My nippers were called dykes by my father, and it stuck with me. The architect thought I was referring to her when I said, "Where are my dykes? He told her that is what some guys we call their side cutters, and everything was fine. The second complain was never tied to me, but I was the one urinating in the finished locker rooms. We were suspose to use the porta potties, but they were always far away, and smelled. Oh yea, my initials are on the top of every locker. I put my initials on the pressed wood before the Cherry laminate went on. When there's a remodel, and those lockers are torn out, they will see my initials. Why? I was bored one morning.)

Yup, my electrician friends refer to lineman's pliers as "the electrician's hammer".

The 11 in 1 screwdriver is fantastic and pretty inexpensive ($15?). Sturdy and has a nice heft to it. I was helping my mom around Christmas time fix something on her RV and had to use her Phillips screwdriver to do it. It was some no name cheap thing that barely held on to the screw and was in general awful to use. On the way home I swung by Home Depot and picked up the Klein and gave it to her for Christmas(along with other things of course).

The Klein needle nose pliers are another good stocking stuffer. The jaws mate properly, etc.

https://www.kleintools.com/catalog/standard-side-cutting-pli...

I recently got the 4-in-1 precision screwdriver and was disappointed to find the bits were not the relatively standard 9mm, Klein’s are ⅓”. I didn’t even know there was such a thing and now I have a screwdriver that will always be limited to it’s original four functions. Seems like a missed opportunity.

I had to look up the Klein bottle opener for math reasons (https://www.kleintools.com/catalog/branded-collection/klein-...). The description is delightfully understated. e.g., "Professionally designed and rigorously tested by an expert team to handle both foreign and domestic applications"

I clicked on your link, recognized the logo and realized that I've had a pair of klein wire cutters for the last 30 years. They are my favorite cutters, I found them on the ground when I was a kid, in front of the telephone box in our yard:

https://www.kleintools.com/catalog/diagonal-cutting-pliers/d...

Klein is for sure world class. I make a point of padding my budget every time I go to the hardware store and now have a Klein for practically any application (automotive mostly) I need.

Linesman’s pliers are often just called “Kleins” by professionals. That’s a pretty good endorsement of quality.

How do they compare to Fluke quality-wise?

Fluke testers are the gold standard in the trades. Electricians often say fluke, meaning tester. Mine is a Fluke 376. Typical.

this is the math joke for those that missed it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klein_bottle

Their T handle allen wrench sets are also much better than average. I recommend them wholly having used them for a year.

Speaking of screwdrivers there’s a thing called a “demo driver” that is basically a screwdriver that can be used as a chisel.

Highly recommended. Here’s Klein’s https://www.kleintools.com/catalog/fixed-blade-screwdrivers/...

I don’t have this one but I have a giant Craftsman that I keep in my toolbox to pry or whatever with.

A while back I fell down a YouTube rabbit hole of experienced electricians going through their tool bags and talking about what they had and why. Lots of Klein tools of course, they all seem to use Klein or Knipex (or both). But one guy called out the large flathead screwdriver that you can stick in your bag and use as a makeshift pry bar or chisel or whatever. I had one that came as part of a set from Craftsmen that I never used so I stuck it in my tool box. I’ve already used it a handful of times and it takes up almost no space.

Yup. I have one that gets used anytime I need to pop the cover on my sprinkler valve box. I have to use a smaller flathead to bleed the valves but the giant one pops it open with little effort every time.

Yep. I never considered it to be useful due to the size and the fact that I rarely encounter flathead screws, but it’s surprisingly handy.

Overkill guy here. You need their toolbags. Yes, you do: https://www.kleintools.com/catalog/leather-tool-bags/deluxe-...

I really admire the writer of the firmware here. This person spent the extra time to embed the actual data into the image. This is the kinda stuff I'd love to see officially documented in a PDF by the manufacturer, if we actually owned the things we owned.

My FLIR camera that I use for electronics only exports in JPEG, with the GUI baked into the image and some pretty crappy JPEG compression artifacts. Lame.

I wouldn't be surprised if there were bullshit reasons for explicitly not exposing this information to the user and this was an engineer's way of maliciously complying with that requirement.

There's no restriction on exporting raw data. Just on resolution and maximum frame rate. Hence the annoying 9fps limit on FLIR's consumer products.

Though I half suspect they also do that for market segmentation since there's a long list of countries that the export restrictions don't apply to. You can easily buy their super expensive cameras which don't have a frame rate limit if you have the money.

There are no legal limitations on the data, just the frame rate.

You just pay extra for a model with fully radiometric export. Which is running the same firmware package and just has different options in the signed config file. It's 100% artificial.

> It's 100% artificial.

That was my point when I said "bullshit reasons".

Same trouble with certain GPS dashcams. The coordinates and date/time are burned into the video, and the font is pure white.

So you can extract the info with OCR... unless you point your car into the sun and the glare of the hood blows out the bottom of the image where the text is.

What FLIR camera is that? I have an E4 and it does the same thing described in the article; inside the crappy jpegs is the "raw" data embedded in them.

The FLIR desktop software uses this data for further analysis and you can export higher quality PNGs from there.

If you keep scrolling, you’ll eventually find the same first viable candidate that I did, the Klein Tools TI250 Rechargeable Thermal Imager.

Unless you need to actually use it in a rough environment, something like the Seek imager is a far better choice. Three times the thermal resolution at 2/3 the price.

Could you link to the one you're talking about? I'd like to check it out.

I got a Seek Thermal Compact.

https://www.amazon.com/Seek-Thermal-Compact-All-Purpose-Micr...

Thanks!

> The camera is great but the Seek Thermal app is a privacy spyware tracker. It won't run without location and microphone access. At all...

Non-starter for me.

FYI. You can just buy FLIR thermal sensors directly and throw them onto a board then use that as a webcam. There's a whole company dedicated to that: https://groupgets.com/manufacturers/getlab

I wish I could upvote you more than once.

This is awesome. Being able to mix and match the parts/boards to get what you want and all with a standard webcam output.

Brilliant.

Oof, yeah they don't need my location and mic access. That's a non-starter for me too.

It's running just fine after I denied those permissions on my phone.

I also have a Seek Compact and the images aren't stunning, but it's still super useful just because I always have it with me.

The EEVBlog Thermal Forum is a great place to learn more. There are some deep wizards over there, some great comparison threads, etc.

I'm curious which model you're referring to. I scanned pages and pages of options without considering Seek.

One of my requirements, I probably should've mentioned, is that the unit had to run standalone -- no smartphone app. I've got enough useless e-waste in my closet that requires the obsolete 30-pin iPhone connector or whose abandoned app has long vanished from the app store.

I've got enough useless e-waste in my closet that requires the obsolete 30-pin iPhone connector or whose abandoned app has long vanished from the app store.

USB isn't likely to go anywhere. I bought my Seek Compact four or five years ago and all it took was a two dollar micro-usb to type-c adapter to keep it running on my newer phones.

Still depends on the developer keeping the app available and runnable on modern devices.

I'd say it's even odds which will expire first, the app compatibility or the non-replaceable battery in the standalone unit.

Problem is there is no open-source drivers for these "appcessory" devices. User has no control but to obey app distribution and developer.

https://github.com/OpenThermal/libseek-thermal

You can rent a high-end TIC from Home Depot for about $100/day. I found all kinds of bad insulation and air leaks in my house. I could claim the rental paid for itself but it was so much fun scanning things the entertainment value was worth the price.

Very cool breakdown! I imagine the engineer(s) who worked on the device's firmware would enjoy seeing this. There's probably some story about companion software that was intended to work with this but never made it to production. Or maybe there was some feature on the backlog for the ability to change the image palette after it's been saved, and the idea was scrapped at the last minute.

This reminds me of when it was discovered you could hack the FLIR E4 into the much more expensive E8 https://hackaday.com/2013/11/04/manufacturer-crippled-flir-e...

The Li-Ion battery on the Klein TI250 is not replaceable as far as I can tell. It will be e-waste within 3-5 years. Same with all the FLIR cameras that I came across. The few models with replaceable batteries at my price range were the Fluke VT02/VT04A (4xAA) and VT04 (an 18650 with a custom connector unfortunately). So I went with the Fluke, even though the FLIRs seemed to have better specs.

To be fair, ordering a battery from AliExpress and opening a device to replace the battery is usually very doable. I have an old Kindle and a USB DAC whose batteries I replaced and they are going strong.

They missed an opportunity to name it the ThermoKlein.

I love ThermoKlein... but then they'd have needed to engineer it to IPX8 standards to avoid excessive warranty servicing from cranky oceanographers.

> The only real major inconvenience using it is the fact that it constantly pauses to calibrate itself to the temperature range it is being exposed to, a process that freezes the screen and UI for well over a second.

Does anyone know what these thermal cameras are doing when they calibrate? Normally I think of calibration as using some known reference to match your sensor data to, but it’s not clear to me what the reference would be in this case.

I don't know the precise answer, but from the article the sensor sets the coldest point in its graph range to 0 and calculates everything else from that. Given that the sensor is probably the most expensive part of this system, I bet that the FPGA or CPU that's running it is struggling to keep up with scanning 10,000 points 7 times a second to find the reference low to calculate everything else from.

I believe there is an internal shutter that is moved in front of the sensor to give a uniform image, and a nearby temperature sensor to give the image an absolute temperature value.

It definitely makes an audible click when it enters (and leaves) calibration mode.

"Klein Tools is a manufacturer of hand tools for professional electricians, and they’ve been in that business for over a century and a half. Are they the best at it? Ehh, depends who you ask."

Well if you ask any professional electrician they will likely answer "Yes". Our company employed over one hundred IBEW electricians and the universal preference was for Klein hand tools.

I can respect that. I think a lot of preference might boil down to the specific tool in question, along with when it was manufactured. Personally, I prefer Wiha screwdrivers far above any other brand, while Klein makes the best crimper tool[1] I have ever used.

[1] https://www.kleintools.com/catalog/combination-cutting-tools...

Side note about SD Cards: I recently started writing embedded code to talk to them, and they are a fussy bunch. Several libraries I found on GitHub failed ungracefully and did not report that the card write buffer was overflowing. I wonder if some of this git code is in consumer electronics? Devices should warn you if the card isn't fast enough.

> Even in highly-contrasted images, it appears as though every value between 0 and the highest value is used. That means if the high point in a given image has value 254, every value from 0 to 254 appears somewhere in that data.

For a second, I thought this was talking about histogram equalization. [1]

But I see what he means now, it's weird that there are no discontinuities.

But wouldn't a discontinuity happen in a _low_ contrast image? If the thermal sensor only picked up 2 raw values, right next to each other, it would have to assign one to 0 and one to 254, leaving the rest unused.

That is, color banding. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histogram_equalization

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour_banding

Nice little reverse engineering story ! How observant of Scott to notice there was a bunch of extra data in those files…

Even expensive thermal cameras do that, though they have a setting to disable it (at the cost of losing calibration).

The keyword to look for is usually Auto-NUC (non-uniformity correction) or just auto-calibrate. Usually in terms of minimum time and/or temp change.

I believe this Klein Tools camera is a re-brand of the Uni-T UTi80P, so probably these tricks apply there as well.

Dang, you're right! Check out this video[1] around 1:35. (Mute it though, seriously.) There's software that pulls the same metadata that I did. Definitely need to do some digging now.

EDIT: It's probably a UTi120P given the apparent sensor resolution. Amazing find, nonetheless!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTefQL2qeV0

Excellent! I have the Uni-T version and it was suspiciously similar :)

There is a firmware update downloadable on the Klein website. On unpacking, it doesn't look compressed, has a table early on in the data and contains the string STMicroelectronics. So without going any further, I'd bet this has "bare metal" (no OS) code running on some STM32 ARM microcontroller -- for which there are a lot of public tools. i.e. alternate firmware could likely be made for this.

Klein Katapult wire strippers are the GOAT strippers for anybody with hobbies that use 8-32 AWG wiring. Especially silicone insulated wiring.

Klein Tools are definitely top notch, no question. But so are Knipex. And Wera.

For thermal imagers, I prefer the FLIR brand.

What a nice little surprise hidden in each image, for those with the skills to look

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