Foolish purchases of the age

[fivemack]

A little while ago, I bought a thermal-infra-red camera. It was quite expensive, and I was not entirely sure what to do with it.

I was able to take surprisingly unflattering pictures of my friends, some of whom had cold fingers, were handling oddly-shaped insulating objects, or were drinking cold cider:



Normal spectacle lenses are good mirrors for thermal-IR, so everyone appears to be wearing Latin-American-dictator sunglasses indoors.

I could determine the existence of the moon, that my bicycle had not been stolen, and that the houses opposite had had their roofs insulated:


I could observe that black clothes left to dry in an unventilated conservatory in midsummer get really quite hot, that the hot-water pump in my airing-cupboard was connected to a well-insulated tank by poorly-insulated piping, that the microwave melted chocolate very irregularly, and that the USB-to-ethernet chip on my ODROID-X devboard was getting rather hot (see the PCB shot in visible light)



In addition, I could determine where on the rug I had been standing, deduce that at some point in the night my garden contained at least one cat, and conclude that the ventilator in the corner of my living room was letting cold air in.



You can also deduce by looking at the video feed from the camera that glass windows and shiny metal objects are reflective in the infra-red, but it's a bit hard to take a photo to show that.

I would really appreciate interesting ideas of other things to photograph in the ten-micron band; my house doesn't seem to have any particularly exciting opportunities for insulation, but if anyone has a dwelling with inexplicable cold spots or a machine with inexplicable hot spots, I can at least document them in exchange for a small amount of polite conversation. I'm wondering whether there is interest to be had in the depths of the Fens on a cold November night, but would rather not do that alone.

I am not entirely sure how happy this device is to be taken across international borders - it's the 9Hz version, so was exportable from the US to the EU and is happy within the EU, but I suspect taking it to India or China would attract quite the wrong kind of attention from customs.

Comments

[twoeleven.livejournal.com]

Can the camera see steam rising from a hot drink? Or convective currents in a typical thin-walled plastic bottle with an ice cube floating at the top of warm water?

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

I tried with a hot drink and saw nothing. Plastic's opaque, water's opaque, so I tried with the bottle and think I might have seen something convection-ish at the start of the experiment but nothing once the bottle had come to equilibrium with the water; it was only after adding the hot water that I realised that normal-sized ice cubes don't fit down the neck of normal-sized bottles, and equilibrium was achieved by the time I had managed to cut the ice cube in half.

I tried a pan with half an inch of boiling water in, added an ice cube, and saw swirly patterns in the surface; but, whilst the screen on the back of the camera updates at 9Hz, it takes a photo every two seconds if you hold down the take-photo button. This could clearly be finessed by using a mobile phone to video the screen, if you have a user with three hands or a kludgy jig made of plywood.

[history-monk.livejournal.com]

Open up a computer, and take time-lapse pictures of it warming up from cold?

Ditto of a bowl of fruit and ice-cream melting?

Compare heat signatures of an tungsten filament light bulb, a CFL and an LED?

[lisajulie.livejournal.com]

ping jonsinger?

[arnhem.livejournal.com]

Colleagues took photographs of computer keyboards after people had typed their password. This almost certainly works for cashpoints too ...

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

How about a portrait series of hot new SF authors?

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

(Is there still a "Hot-- or Not?" site out there somewhere? You could settle such questions.)

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Would be interesting to strap an ordinary camera to the device and play around with fusing visible and thermal IR data. Can't make them coaxial, but you might come close, or even devise a clever mount to swing each camera into the same POV in rapid succession.

history_monk suggests that time-lapse might be interesting. A candle? A campfire?

Night wildlife photography might be interesting. Find where flocks of geese sleep?

[seawasp]

Note that not only is this something my company does for money, it's something I have a patent in.

There are multiple uses for IR imagery, as well as fused IR-VIS imagery. One that we sell commercially is something to detect functional or failed brakes on commercial vehicles or trains.

Electrical fault detection is a common use, as is one you've already determined (home energy efficiency auditing, looking for leaks/failures of insulation in various areas.

Security imagery is a very common use, since IR isn't affected by day or night cycles.

Seeing through fog, smoke, etc., is what the military commonly uses it for.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

If you've the right friends, I've seen fun movies taken with those cameras involving showers. So fun, in fact, I thought of buying one myself. . . .

[angoel.livejournal.com]

Lend it to people who want to check how well the thermal insulation on their house works.

[del-c.livejournal.com]

I was going to say the people in those houses had overinvested in roof insulation while letting heat out the walls; but then I decided it was just the angle of the sun, because even the cars were cold on top and warm on the side.

[bugshaw.livejournal.com]

Bad stop-motion animation where all you can see is which part of the model was recently handled into position?

More interesting stop-motion animation showing the passage of touch of invisible hands or feet?

Find the escaped hamster under the furniture!

[crazyscot.livejournal.com]

You could set yourself up as some kind of insulation / home energy consultant?

[jojomojo.livejournal.com]

My entire house is a cold spot, I suspect explicable, however, by being a Grade 2 listed 18th century end terrace. :)

[simont]

Do you happen to have versions of those photos without the assorted overlays of temperature, crosshair and trademark?

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Regrettably not, as far as I can tell. What I've put up are the JPEG files copied straight from the SD-card from the camera. I suppose in future I could make a habit of taking three photos and do the obvious motion-detection and median-filter.

Alternatively, there is an 1266-byte 'Maker Note' block in the EXIF file I'm looking at, which might contain enough entropy to fill in the gaps; but I can't figure out the runes for dumping it. exif --show-mnote says 'Unknown format or non-existent MakerNote' which seems to be missing the point rather.

[simont]

Oh well, I'll just have to use this picture as is then :-)

[pavanne.livejournal.com]

I think that's very cool.

I'd use it to photograph bird eggs during incubation, to see if there are temperature differences detectable as the embryo develops. It's notoriously difficult to figure out what's going on in an eggshell once the embryo occupies too much of the shell to shine a strong light through the egg. At a minimum, I assume this device could tell if the egg was hotter than the incubator (=alive) or at ambient temperature (=explosion risk).

[emperor]

I'd be interested to see which (if any) bits of our house are particularly leaky...

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Happy to do that; probably easiest in the evening/night because the contrast between inside and outside is higher then. You're generally more fully booked than me; email and figure out a workable date?

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

That is a very cool toy indeed, though I do see the issue of finding interesting targets for it.

You might try landscapes with a variety of foliage in direct sunlight, going for varying infrared reflectivity rather than for heat emissions (that's the classic target for far-infrared art photography). (Firefox spill-chucker doesn't known "reflectivity".)

Industrial plants from the air, but that's a lot of trouble mostly (maybe there's an overlook somewhere that has interesting plant below?).

[mobbsy.livejournal.com]

If only there was some convenient place in the middle of the Fens...

(Pick a clear night and we can combine it with star gazing)

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

Under the bonnet of a car

Filling a bath timelapse

Compost heaps, manure heaps

Horses after a run

Chocolate teapot timelapse, to continue the pseudo research paper tradition.

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

Ir camera popular at eastercon, would you consider doing a talk/demo at Loncon?

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Ooh, that sounds fun. I'd be very happy to do that.

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

Excellent, I've mentioned this on the Loncon Science programme bounce.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Aargh, sorry, I thought you were talking about the Glasgow Eastercon. I'm not going to London in 2014 - I am going to Kyrgyzstan instead