[Techtoolslist] Using Flir android thermal camera to track down short

[Dave McGuire]

On 9/10/19 11:21 AM, Kurt Mahan wrote:
> Had a couple of nice Flukes at my last job.  Made quick work of a lot of
> troubleshooting - both for work and also to borrow to use on game
> boards.  They were also popular as it started getting cold outside for
> people to borrow over the weekend to see where they needed to insulate
> :)  When our site was closing those were among the things from the lab
> that other sites were fighting over.
> 
> For those of us without a big lab budget anymore (and even on ebay used
> Fluke imagers cost a fortune) what are people using that they like?  And
> also any "stay away from" units?
> 
> There are a few Android imagers out there (DavidS mentioned the FLIR One
> Pro)..

  I have a Seek Thermal Compact, which is fairly cheap at $239 (Amazon),
and I use it to great effect in the lab on my Galaxy S5 Android phone.
It came with a really nice and very small hard case, so I ended up
carrying it in my pocket everywhere.  We have three large commercial
buildings with lots and lots of older fluorescent light fixtures, so
this came in very handy for locating ballasts that were starting to fry.

  Then I upgraded to a Galaxy S9, and it doesn't work with that model,
despite supporting all of the relevant protocols.  A lot of people,
myself included, were quite pissed off about that and the Seek people
have been pretty quiet about it.  Other than that, it's a high-quality
device and I like it quite a lot.

  So my old Galaxy S5, which still works great but has no phone service
attached to it, lives in my lab to support the imager, and I no longer
carry the imager around with me because I'm not going to also carry the
S5 just to support it.  This was a bit disappointing.

  There is some very basic software for Linux that works with this
imager, which comes in handy sometimes.

              -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire
McGuire Scientific Services, LLC
New Kensington, PA