
The FLIR One, a heat camera for the iPhone, is now available - teichman
http://www.flir.com/flirone/
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marvin
Just a note on UX and visualization: Mapping temperature to a color/wavelength
is not the perceptually best way to convey data. Humans are not good at
estimating the distance between two data points when using a rainbow color
scale. Using luminosity would be much better, or even a color scheme that uses
saturation. See e.g. [http://colorbrewer2.org/](http://colorbrewer2.org/).
Different schemes are perceptually good to use depending on whether your data
is categorical, scalar or(/and) has a fixed center value that has semantic
meaning. It doesn't look like the actual camera uses this mapping, but the
demo pictures on the front page do. I'm not sure which color scale is used for
the actual camera interface.

A side note to this: Sometimes, users expect a particular color mapping and
will object to using a coloring scheme that is perceptually better. E.g.
doctors often view diffusion tensor images where each point in the image
represents a 3-dimensional value, using the RGB colors for each dimension.
This is a perceptually horrific choice, since practical demonstrations would
reveal that there is significant perceptual ambiguity when viewing data
represented like this. But an engineer once made a prototype that used this
mapping, and now the operators are unwilling to change their habits.

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dm2
It probably wouldn't be hard to make an option that switches between different
types of viewing styles, it's all on the software side.

Here is one camera that can switch views:
[http://nightvisionplanet.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/i...](http://nightvisionplanet.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/1680x/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/t/h/thermal-
image-05_3.jpg)

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frik
Interesting. As a FLIR camera used to be expensive, I built my own thermal IR
camera for $120 (2011):
[http://oi60.tinypic.com/2820yg2.jpg](http://oi60.tinypic.com/2820yg2.jpg)

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omegant
Do you have a tutorial?

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IshKebab
Probably a scanning IR thermometer. Not really the same thing...

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frik
you are right, well almost. I am using not an IR thermometer, but medical
grade IR sensor. But you can reuse an IR thermometer too (with a bit lower
grade results).

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lunixbochs
I got one of these to debug thermal leakage. I very much like it.

Here's a shot of my laptop:
[http://bochs.info/img/IMG_0676-20140822-211311.png](http://bochs.info/img/IMG_0676-20140822-211311.png)

If anyone's curious about something specific, I'll gladly take requests for
photos. It's super interesting to see things from a temperature perspective.

~~~
Gracana
What am I seeing on the right below the LCD, is that the backlight driver?

~~~
lunixbochs
I think it's the CPU's heatsink/fan. The warm cable on the left is a
thunderbolt ethernet adaptor.

~~~
Gracana
Oh a cable, of course. I thought I was looking at hot air blowing out from a
vent on the side.

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eddyg
Worth mentioning the "Affordable thermal imaging" Kickstarter project[1] which
currently has about 14 days to go. The nice thing about this product is that
it is not tied to a specific phone or tablet, is less expensive than the FLIR
One, and you don't need to frequently close a "shutter" to re-calibrate to
boot.

[1]
[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1075169276/hemaimager-a...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1075169276/hemaimager-
accessible-thermal-imaging-for-smart-de)

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joshu
I'm not really thrilled about it being for a specific phone that is likely to
have a physical form factor not guaranteed to have any particular lifetime.

~~~
bagels
Even with that... the non-iphone versions they previously sold were thousands
of dollars. This is a huge leap in affordability even if you have to buy an
old iphone 5 to go with it.

For instance, the E4 they sell is $1000 and up.

~~~
joshu
Fine. I bought it. It's amazing.

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steven2012
I want to get one but they launched their product disastrously close to the
iphone6 launch. I'm going to wait for their iPhone 6 version because I don't
intend to keep my iphone5 around.

I still have my iPhone 4 but it is gathering dust and the batteries are dead
so I don't want to waste $350 on something similar.

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locusm
How much? The buy now link says "FLIR ONE™ is Not Currently Available Outside
the US"

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stevep98
$349

~~~
locusm
Wanted something like this the other day to see how heat was moving around a
server room...

~~~
sparkman55
Most people use an infrared thermometer 'gun' for this. You can buy them at
Home Depot...

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chrisan
FLIR captures some interesting stuff in F1 Racing
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvuBe6b2iVk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvuBe6b2iVk)

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jacquesm
Is there something specific about the camera in the Iphone that would preclude
doing a similar thing to android phones? Or is it just a matter of uniformity
of the housing?

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wahsd
That is probably precisely the reason why it's not available for Android,
there are hundreds of different physical form factors and many more
configurations.

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lunixbochs
Yeah, not so much the phone's camera as figuring out how to strap the thermal
camera on and plug it in. It has its own internal battery as well, so it's not
the smallest load.

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codezero
I used one of these at MacWorld, and asked the rep what distance it was
effective at, their answer was less than 15 feet.

~~~
lunixbochs
What do you mean by effective? FLIR's support told me it can pick up the heat
signature of a person at 100 meters. I went outside earlier and it seemed
alright at a long distance. It's not like it simply doesn't work after 15'.

I think due to the resolution many of the interesting things you can do with
it will end up being at short range.

I also noticed it reports the sun's temperature as "> 212º F" so there's that.

~~~
codezero
I didn't get a quantitative definition of effective, I asked how far it would
detect a heat signature, they said 15 feet. I'm sure it "works" at greater
distance, the question is how much noise you get and how reliable it is at
greater distances.

They had one on site and the reason I asked the range was because I held it up
and looked and it seemed very very local. I'd be happy to see this thing
produce a heat signature that you can identify as human at 100 yards, that
isn't the same as a human's heat signature at 100 yards though.

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hbbio
Within five years, the iPhone 10 or so will probably have heat sensors (and
many others) built in!

