I see in the local glossy a firm offering to take "thermographic" (infra red) pics. of houses etc. The intention is to spot local hotspots (ie because of missing insulation), and damp areas. Seems like a good idea - I have no idea how expensive it is. Just wondering though if anyone knows if/where these cameras can be hired from. Seems like a good diy task.
"thermal imaging camera hire" produces several results - most of which are rather reluctant to measure pricing, eg
You can assemble your own IR cam for a few tenners.
NT
eg
Not that can see any wavelength of use for this application I will wager...
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember dave saying something like:
Afaik (I haven't tried it), many older webcams and small point and shoot digicams can be easily converted to being IR sensitive by removing an IR-blocking filter on the sensor - then you use an IR-transmissive filter on the lens. I suggest a google on the matter.
Police bring out the helicopter, then abandon the car & run into your garden to hide.
Then wait until its shown on Police Camera Action or Sky Cops.
Simples.
That'll be near Infrared, and not the right spectrum for thermal vision.
It's now easy to buy these, and relatively cheap. Two grand gets you a handheld with a (rather small) colour LCD screen that only weighs a pound or so and doesn't require any cooling. Try the FLIR systems i5 and similar. Hire on these is a couple of hundred / day (but varies a lot).
The thing is remember is what "IR" and "hot" mean, for your application. Read up on "Planck distribution" for why: the hotter things are, the shorter the wavelength you need to look at and the easier this is. For things as hot as lighbulbs (or reflected light from them), or even "red hot" ironwork, a standard issue Mk1 eyeball can see the glow. For "heating systems" then it's no so hard either, for "spotting people" it's moderately difficult and for spotting through military camouflage it gets awkward. In particular, the sensor needs to be cooled down, so doing this handheld becomes very tricky.
So if you do hire, make sure you hire something that's capable of seeing what you need, but not over-capable or you'll be paying for it. File export capability probably matters too and although that's trivial to build in these days of digital cameras, it carries a price premium.
An "IR camera" isn't the same thing, nor is a "night vision" rig. IR cameras work in the very near infra red, with LED illuminators, and won't see anything glowing from its own heat alone unless it was too hot to tough. They'll see chimneys, but not heating radiators.
A night vision camera works at similar wavelengths to eyeballs, hardly even IR, but is hugely sensitive as they have an "image intensifier", an internal amplifier.
Military-grade (and fire-brigade / rescue) kit has to work at really long wavelengths to see things that are merely cool rather than cold. They still can't (AFAIK) use a "camera" sensor for this, but suitable single spot detectors have been known for 100 years or so. Their complexity is in mechanically scanning mirrors, so as to image the whole scene with a raster scan using this single point detector. They're thus heavy and complicated. Although they're not actually too hard to find on the surplus circuit, they're a bit of a swine to get working again.
I was wondering about a cheap IR thermometer (Maplin etc) combined with some sort of DIY scanning arrangement.
Owain
Two main problems with that:-
1) The type of sensor you are talking about will have an very long response time - probably 0.5s or more which means to generate a raster scan of any significant resolution will take bloody ages!2) You also need to focus the object imaging spot onto the sensor - glass lenses are no good at far IR - they appear black!. So you will need a ££££Germanium lens.
So all dooable, but not practical.
They should have done an IR one on the google van.
Already done. Doesn't work that well. Next?
Then they really would have had a privacy issue.
Concentrated areas of heat behind upstairs windows in the day time,
And a tradesman van parked outside ....
Bang on right. NIR is not IR as you say. The "IR" filters for digital cameras may produce a pretty pictures but certainly not a thermal image.
Ah - hang on just there. I think you can see the snag.
Ah good - at least it's back to DIY - now wacky NIR and £££££££ ideas.
Usually they go to mirrors instead, for much that reason.
If you do 10 "pixels" per metre (every 100mm) for a 8m wide x 6m high frontage and it takes 30s to take a reading, it would take 4h.
I didn't think any lenses would be required, I was thinking of mounting the thermometer on something like a uniselector to rotate it round about a 90deg arc and then return it to start and increase the inclination. With a timer circuit to pulse the uniselector and press the 'read' button the thermometer could either store a sequence of readings, which could be correlated to position afterwards. If the thermometer doesn't store a sequence of readings then a cheap digital camera mounted over the display and connected by a delay timer to the 'read' impulser would handle the logging. The thing could then run unattended assuming it didn't get nicked.
This supposes the thermometer works when pointing at an angle to the target surface.
Owain
So useful for finding your local cannabis farm.
Owain
Owain submitted this idea :
Interface the display driver output directly to a PC and you can then log it on the PC.
The problem is the aspect ratio of the IR thermometers - nine foot back from a wall they are looking at a one foot square area, so not really useful.
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