CamIRa online thermal imager

Hi, Habr! We are glad to tell you about our CamIRa project - this is an online thermal imager on a turntable. Once we have a conventional camera and an IR matrix for taking thermograms, this is how our project turned out. This combination provides interesting opportunities. About thermal imagers, there have already been posts on Habré, for example: about the tyts technology or the thermal imager for the ITyts smartphone or even how to assemble the thermal imager for $ 100 more . The thermal imager from the last post caused a violent reaction on the Internet, where many were published and discussed. Basically everyone was interested in the issue of increasing the resolution of the sensor. But first things first.


The idea of ​​a thermal imager online

Once on a cold winter day, on a business trip, I got sick. The hotel staff is forbidden to give pills to guests, and the pharmacy was far away, so I had to take a lot of fruit drink and hope that everything goes by itself. It did not pass by itself, my temperature rose strongly, and lying in a light fever, an idea came to the inflamed consciousness. Why not make a rotary thermal imager with data analysis in the cloud. It would be great: there are such things everywhere, it became a bad person, the device noticed it and called for help. Or even because of poor contact in the wiring, before the start of the fire, he could have warned the owner about the problem.

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Then I fell asleep and in the morning I began to feel better, went to the pharmacy for antipyretic drugs. But the idea did not leave me, as they say - “If yesterday’s idea remained in your head, then this is the very Idea!”. I began to explore more available technologies.
The closest analogue found is, to put it mildly, inadequate: the FLIR A5 camera with a resolution of 80x64 pixels for industrial process automation systems will cost $ 2500. You need to connect it yourself to the network and also connect it to software that is even more expensive.
Further search prompted me to a budget thermal imager for $ 100, I mentioned it at the very beginning of the post. Its basis was ideally suited for my idea: we supplement it with a normal IR sensor of 32x31 pixels, transfer software to the clouds, implement IR analysis algorithms. Profit!

There is safety in numbers.
For any undertaking, you need a good team. Where to look for it, you ask, everything is simple: go more for events, look for like-minded people. So gradually, the project was overgrown with a team. Someone has already left, someone has joined recently, and someone has always been with us. Now we are open for any cooperation arrangements, we are already in the team of 4 people.

We built, built and finally built.

At the moment, we want to present to Habra a working prototype with the following characteristics:
IR matrix - two options are possible 32x31 and 80x60 and there, and there are the same viewing angles. With such matrices, we can construct a panorama of a room of approximately 160x155 and 400x300 pixels, respectively. IR image is complemented by a 1080p camera. This allows, if necessary, to make an interesting overlay image using interpolation , as in the imager for a smartphone, similarly made a picture of the router.

For communication, it is possible to use either Wi-Fi or USB modem of any Linux compatible, while using a cellular network, 3G / 4G coverage is optimal for high-quality online transmission of both video and IR data.

In the plans to develop the body, we have an example of how it could look for the end user, is presented at the very beginning of the post. There is a lot of work to be done both on the layout of electronic components and on the manufacturing technology of the case itself .

If you have read up to here, you are probably interested to find out, and what can he do that others cannot. Let's compare: there are expensive online monitoring systems on the market, there are thermal imagers for industrial vision systems, there are manual thermal imagers for personnel. All of them are used for comparative thermography wiki . To measure accurately the temperature value does not give us the coefficient of reflection, for each material it has its own. But this is not required if we have something to compare: getting a thermogram of the same place at different times can understand the beginning of the problem and respond in advance. All these systems have significant drawbacks - this is the price, difficulty in use, the need to buy expensive software. We make our device according to the principle “even my mother will be able to use”, and the price does not exceed 20,000 rubles. All you need to use CamIRa is a PC or smartphone connected to the Internet.



Possible cases of use now:

- Monitoring of temperature: we allocate a zone on the thermogram, for example, sockets with power supplies included in them, we indicate a temperature threshold of 60 degrees, that's all, CamIRa itself will alert you if the temperature rises above the limit value.

- Security of the room : we indicate the zone with all the available space, set the temperature range from 30 to 40, if a person appears in the zone, CamIRa will notify you.

-Control equipment / people: choose the equipment, set the temperature of its normal operation, for example, a welding machine in the workshop, CamIRa will track them and send a report on how much the equipment worked, how long it was idle.

This is not a complete list, if you have your case of application, write in the comments about it!

Future

We have a lot more plans in our plans: implement machine learning algorithms for analyzing IR data; increase resolution; develop a housing and its electronics. Yes, now the brain of our device is the Raspberry Pi - we will tell about the development and technical details in the following posts.