Science/Engineering/Technical forums

I got some new toys to play with recently, some thermal cameras. Smallest one is about 1-3/8" at it largest diameter and about 4" long, it uses a uncooled 320x240 sensor. I took this pic of a motherboard with it:



Next on is the big brother to the little one, it uses a 640x480 uncooled sensor. It snowed this last week here so I shot some video outside:



And last, but not least, is a 640x480 camera made by FLIR. This one is a bit special. It uses a stirling cycle cryo-cooler to drop the sensor temp down to 77K. great sensitivity, they use the same imaging for, video processor, and optic train as in the Recon III binoculars which cost over $80,000. Pretty neat, it outputs in composite, VGA, and HDMI. Unlike the other cameras which just output raw monochrome video, this does the whole false color thing. Pretty powerful video processor, uses two Vertex 4 FPGAs and a PowerPC to drive it.

That's just freaking awesome! If you find any more of those, be sure and let me know! Man, you're "white hot" in this

We've been having that polar vortex junk, and now a foot or more of snow here too. A good camera like that would help me find heat leaks far better than what I'm using now - a one unfocused pixel IR thermometer, mainly (and the usual human senses).

I did shine a couple of different color lasers out the window and aimed my normal vidcam at them. Not sure it's worth posting, but it looks cool in person.
Especially that high power green one I have - that thing really reaches out there and "strobes" as the snowflakes pass the beam. But it's only 20mw, so probably wouldn't show on your IR as heating the flakes all that much - most of it just bounces off as visible green.

There will be some for sale, I dont know how much yet, that's my friends decision.

I did the same thing with one of my lasers, a 500mw argon.

Wow, in the blue line? That's serious stuff! I bet that would vaporize the flakes...should show up nicely in IR with a rising plume of hot vapor from each hit?

Doug Coulter wrote:Wow, in the blue line? That's serious stuff! I bet that would vaporize the flakes...should show up nicely in IR with a rising plume of hot vapor from each hit?

Nah, not nearly enough power to do anything like that. Its is a little warm putting your hand in front of it. Focused down it can burn though black plastic slowly.

It is a multiline argon, it emits about 7 colors from green to purple all at the same time.

Bounced off a grating: