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Comment by rtomanek | Hacker News Reader

$523 total? That's not my definition of affordable.

Depends. 523 USD for a car is suspicously cheap. 523 USD for a mediocre sandwich is outrageously expensive.

Context matters and thermal imaging is very expensive usually.

Separately, there's a notion of purchases large enough you have to plan for them. $523 is a few weeks of pay for some people even in the US. The headline is set up to suggest a low-cost (because it's DIY) relative to the status quo of devices an average student couldn't really buy to tinker with. The result is more expensive than an off-the-shelf thermal camera I bought awhile ago without substantially better features (other than tinkerability).

I still find it expensive for a thermal imager. I personally bought a Chinese Guide PC210 for €216 shipped, and that includes 21% VAT, for a whole unit and not just a sensor. For another €15 I got a ZnSe lens for macro use.

Not only is it cheaper, on paper it's also much better:

  - 45 mK vs 50 mK thermal sensitivity  
  - ±2 °C or ±2% vs ±10°C or ±10% accuracy  
  - 256x192 vs 160x120 resolution  
  - 25 vs 8.7Hz framerate  
  - -20 to 550 °C vs -10 to 450 °C range

The kicker is that (being European) I can't even get a FLIR equivalent to some of these specs, as they would violate ITAR export restrictions.

Emphasis being "on paper". When I worked for a research company we got a cheaper Korean company to demo their thermal cameras. They were just way way worse than FLIR and the software was abysmal (FLIR's software is surprisingly good).

Ended up going for the £4k FLIR camera (not my money tbf). On the plus side I didn't even know about the 9fps thing at the time and they didn't ask me about it, but we still got a 25fps camera. Not exactly sure how that happened.

I intentionally mentioned the on paper part because I can't attest to the absolute accuracy, but in the aspects that are easily comparable I would say it's way ahead of the FLIR C5 that cost 4x as much I use at work.

Both are used for diagnostics of electronics, so the resolution and framerate make a noticeable difference here. On top of that mine boots up and is ready to go in under 5 seconds, while the FLIR takes close to a minute to get ready for some reason.

Likely because it is self-calibrating or waiting for some internal temperature to stabilise.

For a lot of uses that doesn't really matter tbf. IIRC in the FLIR software you can disable the periodic self calibration they do (which is quite annoying). Maybe that would improve startup time.

How did you match up a lens for this?

One of the European sellers of the camera (Eleshop) sells a lens and 3d printed holder. I just bought the same lens and 3d printed a holder myself, from what I remember someone on the eevblog linked a suitable one.

Oh, ok. Thanks

Hi, where did you buy it for that price? I can't find an offer which is even close to that price range.

You are right, there are cheaper solutions like smartphone addons, but as a standalone thermal imager including display, storage, etc., there are not many options that are less expensive and provide the same flexibility in terms of open-source software and hardware. This is a comparable all-in-one device from FLIR itself: https://www.amazon.de/FLIR-89401-0202-C5-Kompakt-W%C3%A4rmeb...

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