FLIR – Thermal Imaging Device for iPhone 5 | Hacker News Reader

FLIR – Thermal Imaging Device for iPhone 5

flir.com

85 pointsry0ohki62 comments

Relevant:

Turn cheap FLIR into expensive FLIR imager: http://hackaday.com/2013/11/04/manufacturer-crippled-flir-e4...

Kickstart Phone Thermal Imaging: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mu-thermal-camera-a-great-...

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andyrawson/ir-blue-therm...

From that indiegogo, this kind of thing always gives me pause: "We'll send you a Mµ Optics Thermal Imager for $125. ... This represents $200 off the MSRP."

Not endorsing... I just had looked into some options awhile back.

Oh, I was just talking about selling something at or below cost initially but then having a much higher MSRP, then saying that "clearly there's a market there." Just seems like a lot more people would buy this as a fun accessory at $125 than $300.

100% markup is pretty standard on nice hardware.

Why? If their hardware BOM is $125, MSRP would be around $499. If they wanted to seed some units in the marketplace, they could sell them for essentially landed BOM and not lose anything on it (obviously they can't sell ALL their inventory that way).

If the MSRP is $325, then hardware cost should be sub-$100. So $125 might a breakeven price in terms of cost+basic expenses.

The Mu Thermal Camera is almost certainly fake at this point. Check out the EEVBlog forum thread about it:

http://www.eevblog.com/forum/crowd-funded-projects/m-thermal...

They basically posted increasingly vague updates and no concrete information about the product.

Nobody is going to read a 52 page shitBB thread... Can you give us the gist? It seems like an odd scam to run.

I don't think it's an engineered scam, especially since they've been quite decent about refunding people to-date. I suppose in that respect "fake" was the wrong word to use - given time and money which they seem to have I'm sure they can eventually make the product.

However, I do think the project owners got in over their heads and rather than giving up are building increasingly bizarre fabrications instead - something we see in the software startup world frequently, too!

The gist is that they promised a release date and it's been slipping ever since. This is pretty typical for crowdfunded, small projects as everyone vastly underestimates the time to delivery especially when it's their first rodeo.

The part that's a red flag for me is that even prior to their recent public silence their updates were cyclic and bizarre. They'd say they had a design and were choosing case prototypes, then two months later reappear to say that they had to move offices and somehow in the process did a complete layout do-over and were working on cases again, then reappear to say they were "finalizing" firmware for "optimal warm-up."

Throughout this whole process they've never provided an actual image from their camera.

http://www.muoptics.com https://www.facebook.com/pages/Mu-Optics/274122436049948

I've spoken to these guys and they are just taking longer than expected. I don't think it's vaporware. They could probably do better on the communication department on that note.

I took of pic of one in action last night:

http://imgur.com/vT4vl2o

Seemed pretty responsive. Good enough to capture the residual temperature from someone touching a table. Not pro level stuff obviously but worth exploring for basic thermal imaging applications it seemed to me.

My shot from last night (a cup of hot tea): http://imgur.com/XQRD7fj

Should have thought of that, I was surrounded by hot and cold props and just let the dude hold it up. Ah well, it turned out all right.

But can this see through walls/vehicles like the IR binoculars in that Jackie Chan movie?

Looks like the thermal imaging resolution was about 30x45 pixels, based on some quick measurement in Photoshop. However, it's interesting to see how much higher the apparent resolution is thanks to the overlaid edges from the visual camera.

You can turn off the overlay if you want, it's only there when there's lots of visible light.

Good enough for seeing what PIN was typed on the atm machine?

Oh definitely. But ssshh

You mean, so you can 1) mug the cardholder, and 2) try all the 4x4 combinations (or 5x5 for mine), which I believe will get the card eaten after a small number of failures? Seems like it would be much useful for snooping pinpad door lock codes, which often don't seem to care how many errors you enter in a short period.

Good point. Real criminals attach an inconspicuous cam and a skimmer to the machine.

New advice: after typing PIN, place your palm over the buttons to heat them all evenly.

All down to the resolution. Judging by the product binning on the rest of their cameras, this will be a 4x4 pixel sensor.

The real URL for this submission should be — http://www.flir.com/flirone/

While they didn't say anything about the specs of the infrared part, the device seems to include a VGA camera for the multi-spectrum blending mode. If the infrared camera is similar... well, it won't win your infrared photography any awards at the art show, but it's not the worst.

Postscript: A nearby link to Hackaday talks about a 320x240 resolution that was firmware-limited to some fraction of that on the cheaper model. I'm going to throw out a wild-ass guess that they'll have a similar sensor here.

It'll probably be the exact same sensor, the question is can the software be hacked to make it anywhere near useful? If it's cheaper than their cheapest normal camera (it is) we can only assume it will have a significantly lower gimped resolution as a result.

Imaging is going to be the next "big" ITAR battleground. I think the "Camera Wars" will stir up more public controversy than what we had with the Crypto Wars.

Crypto is not the only munition in disguise.

Thermal imaging sensors have been export-restricted for some time, though the details depend on the type of sensor. Here's a handy chart from DRS Technologies, which makes thermal sensors:

http://www.drsinfrared.com/Support/ExportGuidelines.aspx

I recognize that there have been imaging restrictions in place for some time. It is not just thermal imaging, there is a frames per second ceiling, but I do not recall the number. I think the "Camera Wars" are around the corner because the prices are coming down dramatically not because of new legislation.

Everyone and their dildo is munition if you want to go by ITAR standards. "Does this have a conceivable use by anyone? Well then, we'd better prevent those dern moslems from getting their hands on it."

As someone who has spent the past month fighting with FLIR customer support to get a $5000 camera working robustly and correctly I doubt that this will be a good product. We have dozens of FLIR cameras and at least a quarter of them have been sent back for re-calibration. We're about to send one out for the second time. Also, forget about open source support.

This is meant to be pretty basic. Can you think of anything that could replace it? It seemed to work well when I demoed it, but for pro stuff obviously you wouldn't want to rely on it.

The FLIR machine vision cameras for industrial applications are driving me nuts. To a degree all machine vision cameras can be persnikety when you want to try and use them with FOSS software like ROS. Right now we are fighting with non-uniform correction of the cameras. Basically this is the camera's auto exposure. It consistently gets all out of whack. Also the GigE IP stack on the camera was a righteous bitch to get working. Once you buy the camera you have to spend a small fortune for an GigE SDK that doesn't even work on anything but CentOS. We ended spending a whole weekend doing some basic kernel patches to get the damn thing to kinda work on Ubuntu.

All of this is to say, it will probably work, but don't plan on building after-market apps on top of the camera technology.

For some reason I'm tickled that the security application of this add-on is illustrated by a man lurking around the side of a Scion xB in a parking lot, as though the user constantly has the app up and is holding the camera in front of them everywhere they go.

Shouldn't this be titled "A FLIR camera for your iPhone 5", or something? It's a backpack, not a modification of the phone itself.

I'm reluctant to buy something like this that'll become useless the moment I decide to change/upgrade phones.

Agree, plain USB (i.e. something like a webcam) would be a much better interface.

On the other hand, if this really catches on, and the sensor technology cheapens, in a decade or two we may start to see generic webcam-like thermal cameras from China showing up in the $10 range... which would be rather fun.

Interesting that they aren't using the built-in iPhone camera for the visual spectrum part, but are still using their own. (FLIR uses a visual spectrum camera to do edge detection, and then overlays that on the IR image to make it easier to see what is going on.)

This way the visible and IR cameras are right next to each other.

And they don't have to worry whether the two cameras are pointed in the same direction. And they don't have to worry about the pointing shifting over time.

In addition to what fennecfoxen already stated, using their own visual sensor gives them control over the exact format of the data coming off the sensor, thus permitting them to use FPGA or ASIC based processing that would not be an option if they had to deal with image files coming off the iPhone's camera. It also allows them to collect extra data to help register the visual and IR images to each other.

What distances is something like this accurate to?

I just ordered a 3DRobotics Iris and I'm interested in mounting some thermal/IR/multi-spectral imaging to it ... could something like this work from the sky?

I tested one out last night a little bit, guy said it was about half as accurate as a normal retail FLIR model (accuracy in temp differentiation, which surely has an effect on distance). Here's a pic:

http://imgur.com/vT4vl2o

I was too absent minded to ask about distance specifically.

Is there anyone that does photography where the R in RGB is replaced by thermal values? I've always been curious what the world would look like if our red cones were replaced with a thermal cone cell.

There is multi layer (channel) color infra-red film that does what you are asking. Ad for digital, the technology is slightly different, but explained here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared_photography#Digital_c...

With modified D200s being one choice,

http://gmv.cast.uark.edu/photogrammetry/photogrammetry-hardw...

and this another:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FinePix_IS_Pro

False color [1] images are like that. Some or all the RGB channels will be replaced with other data picked up via sensors tuned to other ranges.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_color

If anyone can send me a sample of the Lepton camera module so I can connect it to my microquad, that would be awesome. Message me if you can help.thx seedmediacreative@gmail.com

I wish they mentioned pricing. Of course IR cameras exist, the thing that makes it interesting is how much it might cost.

Says "under $350" http://www.flir.com/flirone/press/assets/Discover/FLIR%20ONE...

The i7, one of the lower priced units is around $2k, so if it can do the same thing (appears to be the same resolution) it is a win.

What makes those cameras so expensive? I assume it’s the customer base (industrial applications, small customer base compared to the consumer market) that makes them expensive, not so much the cost of actually making them at scale.

http://www.flir.com/flirone/

is the more direct link.

Why would anyone need this?

I think it'd be a fun toy.

IR cameras are useful for doing efficiency evaluations of buildings.

"Play Hide and Seek like never before."

I think the use cases outlined on the site are pretty stupid.

Neat implementation, but is there a market?

I have a 100 year old house that I've been remodeling, and this would enable me to easily find air leaks. I'm skeptical that it will enable me to find studs through horsehair plaster (they show visible studs in the gallery), but it will certainly make it easier to locate the position of forced hot water pipes in the walls and ceilings.

You can clearly see the studs in in the second picture:

http://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/flir-e4-thermal-imagin...

That's a 1927 house with plaster & lath walls.

I like this application--would be handy for anybody doing repairs.

Oh, great! Now I'll really have to get one.

My Flir E4 camera arrived just yesterday and today I plan to investigate if overheating is the reason for my 3d printer (Ultimaker 2) to be unreliable on large prints. Also, I hope to have an insight which parts are getting hot and estimate the best place for a fan.

Are you going to "upgrade" it?

yes, already did.

I used a FLIR i7 this week to find a whole section of wall that had no insulation in it. By feel, it felt colder, but damn if the wall was 55f most places but nearly 35f where there was no insulation. It would have taken me hours to run my hand and/or use a laser-based infrared thermometer; found enough places to work on in just 15 minutes with the FLIR cam..

Thank you all for the replies.

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