Moderator Comment by Gary Mortimer on December 22, 2012 at 12:10am

Very cool, or hot I guess.

Comment by Jhon on December 22, 2012 at 3:36pm

quite poor resolution, isn't it?

3D Robotics Comment by Joshua Ott on December 22, 2012 at 4:27pm

Jhon,

That's the point. By overlaying thermal and visual images, a low res (cheap) thermal imager can be used. The relatively high res visual image maintains a context for the coarse thermal image. This is not meant to be a night vision device, more of a non-contact thermometer taken to the next level! Very cool.

3D Robotics Comment by Joshua Ott on December 22, 2012 at 4:32pm

Now I can berate the Starbucks barista for making my drink the wrong temperature, with scientific evidence.

3D Robotics Comment by Joshua Ott on December 22, 2012 at 6:31pm

Paul, low cost thermal overlay could be used on a drone for all kinds of things- industrial inspection, crop management, search and rescue, etc.

Comment by healthyfatboy on December 23, 2012 at 3:08pm

I was actually thinking of making my own Android program to do the same thing but looks like he's doing it himself so I'll leave it up to him to finish up!

The original idea of a cheap thermal camera came from Max Ritter and is documented at http://www.cheap-thermocam.tk/

In this Arduino thread, he mentioned making an all-in-one unit towards the end of the thread.

http://arduino.cc/forum/index.php?PHPSESSID=e94abcc07da99ee552d66fb...

I had made my own and was thinking of porting it to Android but just don't have the time to do so but was going to use an IOIO or equivalent for it. Looks like Bluetooth is a better way to go.

The sensor being used in this project 99.9% likely to be a Melexis MLX90620 and is a 16x4 array of imagers. It's a $65 part from Future Electronics. 

http://www.melexis.com/Infrared-Thermometer-Sensors/Infrared-Thermo...

http://www.futureelectronics.com/en/Search.aspx?dsNav=Ntk:PartNumbe...|MLX90620|1|,Ny:True,Nea:True

Definitely a very cool project and I'll likely pledge for the PCB board as I'm pretty sure I can get the rest of the parts for under $100 and still come in under the $145 price but like Paul said, you're not going to be able to do much with this from a UAV. Just looking at the numbers in the description, even at 10m, you're looking at pixels that take the average temperature of a 2' x 2' area.

It's nice to see something like this coming down in price so much so it's getting closer to DIY levels to put on a UAV but it's not quite there yet.

3D Robotics Comment by Joshua Ott on December 23, 2012 at 4:57pm

Think of this as proof of concept, things are moving very quickly in these times. I'm applauding the idea for what it can become, it's an infant now for sure. Project forward just a few months and we will have somebody developing a GoPro price point thermal system suitable for detecting an overheating electrical component on a building roof from a multirotor flying 10m above it, etc. If this unit doesn't meet your particular requirements, take the concept and modify the components to suit.

I'm not sure about calibration routines for this device, but I can think of few different ways to accomplish this.

3D Robotics Comment by Joshua Ott on December 23, 2012 at 5:22pm

Does the price jump up terribly for the 33x64?  For something like crop management, resolution would not need to be very high, but some more altitude would be useful for sure.

3D Robotics Comment by Joshua Ott on December 23, 2012 at 5:32pm

Btw, I hope everyone knows I was just kidding about berating Starbucks baristas.

I never go to Starbucks ; )

Comment by healthyfatboy on December 23, 2012 at 8:02pm

There's supposed to be a smaller FOV version of this same sensor released at some point from what I heard from Max, the original guy that did the cheap thermocam. With the smaller FOV, it'll help narrow things down a bit but I don't think it was a drastic change. It would be more expensive of a sensor of course.

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