GeekPi

So the lastest scientific instrument (aka. cool toy) to arrive at the GeekPi headquarters is a Fluke Ti25 thermal imager. As the cost of equipment continues to drop, and they’re used more energy auditing, expect to start seeing more of these in the future.

What Does It Do?

So what is a thermal imager? Think of it like the vision ‘The Predator’ had. This thing sees heat radiating off of surfaces. It operates purely off of that. What is interesting is that off of certain surfaces, it’ll see reflected heat. Example: if you look directly into a plate of glass, you’ll see yourself. The camera has a combined, ’standard’ visible light digital camera too. What is kind of neat is that it’ll combine or Picture-in-Picture the two images to give a better idea of exactly what you’re looking at. The resolutions aren’t mind boggling, with 640×480 for the regular camera, and 160×120 for the thermal imager – but taking massive, detailed pictures aren’t what this thing it about. Oh, and take a look in the gallery of the most impressive stock power supply I’ve ever seen. This thing has every adapter known to man.

This unit was bought as part of my employers’ want to move into energy and building auditing – and it doesn’t come cheap. The MSRP is a steep $8,500. However, considering a decade ago the same technology cost well in the $50,000 range and required active cooling, we’ve come a long way. This unit’s temperature range: -4 to 662* F, and has a temperature accuracy of 2%.  I’ve been able to play with it over the past few weeks and have found it a surprisingly useful instrument to have around.

When you snap a picture, it saves both an information rich colormetric IR image (meaning you can mouse over any point to get a temp) and a regular digital image. It can blend both of these in camera or in their desktop software, along with picture-in-picture as an option. Also as a neat feature for building auditors, you can also record up to 60 seconds of narration to describe the image and situation after you capture the photo. It ships with a 2 gig SD card, which is claimed to hold 2000 paired image files with accompanying audio.

As for operation of the camera, they designed it so you can run all the operations with one hand (if you have a big hand), even while wearing heavy gloves. Being a fluke device, this thing is built like a tank. They claim it’ll survive  5 foot drops onto concrete, but I’m not about to test that claim. The rubberized exterior case offers good ’scuff proofing’ and minor weatherization. I really like that they have an attached lens cover built into the camera that flips from the front face to the top. To get the best possible image with the IR cam, you have to manually operate the focus, but that isn’t too hard. It also has a user serviceable NiMH rechargeable battery in the grip

The Fun Stuff

Ok, first off, it’s a pretty fun device. Every hunter I’ve shown it to wants it, and I bet it’d be great for search and rescue up here in the Pacific Northwest. On a much less serious note, I find using it to check the surface temp of my grilled chicken works well. If you take a look at the gallery at the bottom of this post, you’ll see a whole load of interesting infrared images. Before playing around with this, I never knew the back of a LCD monitor typically gets to be above 120, nor did I know that my desktop tower massively heats up the underside of my desk to 100 degrees. Some of the more interesting shots also include the way heat reflects on nearly every ’shiny’ surface, how easy it is to identify studs (and insulation) in walls, and how much hot air the temperature laserjet copier spews out.

As I get new products in, I’ll make sure to get an IR image of them operating, so you can get an idea of how hot the bottom of a laptop *really* is, or how to deal with waste heat around your home. If you have any suggestions of things to get pictures of, send them my way in the comments below.

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