Steampunk_Prof
Martin SutherlandSo, I rented a FLIR thermal imaging camera for the weekend, for the serious purpose of checking the windows and overall insulation of our house.
But you can also take cat pictures with this thing.
The cat's name is Rocky, btw. His brother Solo comes out looking altogether more demonic.
glasspshr
The Turtle
SecondUniverse (she/her/they)
hnapel
Joachim Séné
Mx. Eddie R
cyocum
Pacman@sunpig Great idea. Next time our cat disappears somewhere in the house I'll just go out and rent a FLIR.
Reid
Hans-Cees 🌳🌳🤢🦋🐈🐈🍋🍋🐝🐜
Su_G
myrmepropagandistI really want one to look at ant colonies and see how they manage heat. Despite not being "warm blooded" they find ways to make their nests warm in winter and cooler in summer.
draeath@futurebird @sunpig one of my colleagues has one that docks to his iPhone (they make android ones too), "only" a hundred or two for a decent one! (he has it for electrical work, looking for hot wires/breakers and such)
I really really really want a wearable FLIR. Something about the thought of seeing the world in a different spectrum while in otherwise total darkness does things to my reptile brain.
@draeath @futurebird Tempting!
MattChippytea@sunpig @draeath @futurebird take a look at the Thermal Master cameras. Their entry level unit is very affordable and much better than the FLIR One.
C++ Wage SlaveYou can probably buy a low-end IR camera, rather than renting one. They're not cheap, but they cost less than, say, a mid-range smartphone. When we moved house, I bought an earlier version of this:
https://www.idealo.co.uk/compare/4862822/flir-one-gen-3-for-android-435-0005-03.html
Predictably, I wanted to use it to find hot spots on the outside of the house and cold spots on the inside to help focus our insulation efforts.
Interpreting images is harder than I imagined, because the amount of IR radiated by an object depends on the nature of the surface and not only on its temperature. You'll be familiar with black-body radiation and the effect of an object's colour on the amount of heat it radiates, but there are other factors that I haven't fully got to grips with. If you just point the camera at your house and look for the yellowest part of the picture, it'll mislead you.
The camera I bought is not compatible with a modern phone. I'm tempted to buy a new one, because they're fun to play with. For instance, it would be interesting to see how much heat is generated, and how it's dissipated, when I charge the car overnight.
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Zimmie@futurebird @CppGuy @sunpig FLIR, Seek Thermal, and Thermal Master all make thermographic cameras which can work with an iPhone or most Android phones. They’re great for quickly sharing images you capture.
Jonathan Yu@CppGuy @futurebird @sunpig I was wondering about this because it seems like a handy gadget to have around all the time
@CppGuy @futurebird Very tempting! The rental was just €40 for the weekend. I know I can get one of the Flir modules that straps to my phone for about €150-200... But realistically it would lie around unused most of the time. It's a bit more than I like to spend for "buy it on a whim, just for fun." 🙂
Same, which is why I haven't gone out and bought a replacement. But it does have some unexpected uses, such as spotting wildlife in the garden at night or (they say) identifying damp patches of inside wall.
Two problems: first, when I used mine, the software was a bit flaky, and it would often fail to see that the camera was plugged into the phone. Second, at least in the model I had, the camera had its own rechargeable but non-replaceable battery, and it wouldn't take power from the phone. Batteries only last so long, so that amounts to built-in obsolescence. When the battery fails, you have to replace the entire camera. I'd like to see a law forcing all manufacturers to use commodity (non-proprietary) batteries and make them replaceable, but we don't live in that world.
coldclimate@sunpig ohhh, where did you rent one from?
@coldclimate I found it on Gearbooker: https://www.gearbooker.com/ Conveniently for me, there was a guy in Haarlem (about 30 minutes away) who had one. If you're in the UK, maybe try hygglo.com? (The site formerly known as Fat Llama.)
Scout@sunpig I always knew they were fiery demons with glowing eyes.
Limes 🇺🇦
rickf
Simon Zerafa (Status: 
😊)Wow! Win 🙂👍
Multiclass Geek
@MulticlassGeek They're so cool!
logBoy@sunpig I borrowed one from a friend for the same reason this week. I found that you can see your reflection in the window in infrared! This shot is in full daylight, to the naked eye my reflection is nearly invisible
SilkesterThermography of the house and the story it tells
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBqEe8IHsuI
The video is in German but youTubes AI-Translation may help, if your German is insuficient.
Darum funktioniert die Fassadendämmung nicht (Konrad Fischer)
@ln @sunpig it really is mind-bending to think about how radiated heat, radio, etc are all just light. It all does the same things - reflects, refracts, etc. It just does it at different scales.
Your wifi router's antennas are like glow sticks, flashing complex patterns at stupidly fast rates, for example, and that "light" is interacting with everything around it!
Feyter@draeath @ln @sunpig I think wifi is using frequency modulation and amplitude modulation.
So I would argue it's not flashing in that sense. It's more changing color and getting dimmer on incredibly fast speeds. But, yes light seams so simple and yet our understanding of reality is falling apart, once we think about it a little longer.
@ln I saw that as well! It's very neat :-)
Alice Averlong🏳️⚧️@sunpig everyone I know (including me) who has ever gotten their hands on a FLIR camera had used it to photograph cats. It's just the thing to do!
Joan of Contention 😷@sunpig This is fabulous! 😍🥰
Joshua Kaden@sunpig @joannaholman That is just so neat
Drey
Ragon2
Karen E. Lund 💙💛
Adam Trickett 
@sunpig if the cat walks away from you with its tail up you can see the spot with very little insulation on its rear... Children usually find this very funny.
sen@sunpig @ireneista one of the first things I did when I got mine was take a thermal image of where my cat had been previously sleeping :D
@sen That's awesome!
Sarah W
S T E L L A R 
@sunpig print it and frame it, your guests need to see your cat
RichardInSandy@sunpig damn, I borrowed one of those a while back and didn’t think to try cat pics ! Most impressive.
jer
Longhairedgit@sunpig that cat is a surprisingly bad insulator.
@sunpig But it also reveals how good fure works... even in infrared cats are still kinda stealthy.
PS:
Also hot / cold water make vor an interesting motive in IR.
Just capturing a different wavelength of light, reveals how much different realreality is from what we are used to think from everyday life.
Eryngium
Delta Sierra@sunpig looking forward to the day when folks on the internet have imaged cats in the full electromagnetic spectrum. You've done IR imaging; I've seen X-ray images and of course lots of images in the 400-700nm range.
But we can do better!
🔥 Mireille Sillander 🔥@sunpig the cat is barely containing that super Saiyan energy
Deixis9
Logan Five Thousand@sunpig Where do you rent the camera from?
@LoganFive I found it through gearbooker.com, a kind of peer-to-peer equipment rental site. The guy renting it was just 30 minutes drive away, so easy to get hold of for the weekend.
Dave Mc