A thumb-sized device that plugs into your iPhone / iPad / iPod Touch headphones jack and turns your iOS device into a Thermal Camera
· Official Hackaday Prize Entry
TJ (Thermal Jack) powers and communicates solely through your iOS device's headphones jack (so it needs NO external battery and uses NO wireless communication). This significantly helps to reduce its cost, complexity and size.
TJ will use an Infrared FPA (Focal Plane Array) with an NETD of 0.15°K, a 4 FPS frame rate and a native resolution of 16 x 16 pixels, generating a heat map upscaled at iOS device's native screen resolution by Bicubic Interpolation.
SuperResolution (combining several low resolution frames which exhibit sub-pixel shifts into a High Resolution stil-image) is currently being evaluated.
Android and PC are supported too via an USB connection. The USB connection also allows updating the TJ microcontroller firmware. A UART connection will be offered too for low-level interfacing purposes.
TJ is a fully open source / open hardware project and a crowd-funding campaign is expected to be launched late 2014 with the purpose of entering mass-production.
Details
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrzKsgabp-E&feature=player_embedded
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Iw1LcJuFTm8
Introduction
Thermal Imaging technology used to be priced prohibitively outside the budget of hobbyists until recent years. Late 2012 when I started working on my 1st Thermal Imaging project, the lowest cost thermal camera available on the market was the Flir i3 (priced at $995 back then). Moreover, there was (to my knowledge) absolutely no lower cost, open-source alternative solution on the market to these expensive, proprietary devices - that mostly had to do with the high development and manufacturing costs of high/medium performance IR FPAs and lenses and with the timid availability of low cost, low performance IR modules (FPA + lens + ASIC), still not implemented in any low-cost Thermal Imager.
I was therefore highly motivated to explore the possibility of developing a Thermal Imaging platform that was low cost ( < $200 to manufacture) and could offer sufficient performance for some of the less demanding hobbyist level tasks. That's how I've started working on Thermal Imaging devices.
Colin Rose | Design Engineer | FPG
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