new $39 thermal scanner on kickstarter, the deltaK!

[exoticelectron]

Shipping: $1.65 to the USA via USPS first class mail

You really have to spring for tracking, or you'll spend all your time dealing with lost/delayed packages.  So that makes the minimum US shipping $2.77.

The housing is the most expensive up-front cost.

Can't you fit it into a standard Chinese plastic box?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/5pcs-Junction-Box-Waterproof-Project-New-Case-Black-Electric-Plastic-55x35x15mm-/142079759201

The reason international shipping is so high is that once an item meets "package" status from USPS, it gets bump WAY up from the "flat" rate to the package rate. I think its a jump from a couple dollars to more like $14. But, if I sell it as a diy KIT with a flat PCB and thin bag of parts, and no housing, it would almost certainly fit into the flat category and cut the cost way down.

The envelope has to fit through a 1/4" slot, which is challenging.  Also, you don't get tracking.

You do get tracking with USPS first class mail, both domestically and internationally. I have shipped hundreds of items for a previous kickstarter as well as hundreds of items on ebay, both domestically and internationally, via USPS first class mail, and not a single one has been lost and they all were trackable along the entire journey.

The PCB is only 1/16" thick and the rest of the parts are very small. It might be doable. I will have to look into it. The test is more involved than just fitting through a 1/4" slot, but even so I think there is a possibility here. This only applies to international shipping btw. USA shipping is $1.60 and there is no issue with size for this product..even a big one with a full housing.

An off the shelf housing is a possibility, but I really dont want this tool to have that look. If I inject the parts myself or have them 3D printed I can make the design memorable and attractive. But everything is on the table at this point. If I have to do additional machining or other work to an off the shelf box I'll have to take that into consideration as well.

EDIT: Oh yeah I forgot they bumped the price up for even 3oz to $2.65. So yeah I would do that for shipping.

[dimkasta]

Since we are doing differential measurements and not absolute ones, having a dual or tri colored led is just a  gimmick.
All you need is a visual indication that what the devices sees is significantly different from its surroundings.
You can do that with a single led that lights with the frequncy when the change is above a threshold. And a small pot can be used to let the user adjust it for more or less sensitivity.
That, on top of the normal sound operation of course.
 I agree the sonic feedback is very nice as it is

Sent from my HUAWEI NXT-L29 using Tapatalk

[exoticelectron]

Since we are doing differential measurements and not absolute ones, having a dual or tri colored led is just a  gimmick.
All you need is a visual indication that what the devices sees is significantly different from its surroundings.
You can do that with a single led that lights with the frequncy when the change is above a threshold. And a small pot can be used to let the user adjust it for more or less sensitivity.
That, on top of the normal sound operation of course.
 I agree the sonic feedback is very nice as it is

Sent from my HUAWEI NXT-L29 using Tapatalk

Its definitely possible with the microcontroller and an LED. I'll take it into consideration. At the moment I'm focused on making the original functionality as inexpensive as possible so as many people as possible can get it. I have never needed a threshold indicator with it, its hard to explain until you use it, but the feedback you get from it doesn't lend itself to hard thresholds or looking at it while you are using it. Its like a 6th sense...

[edavid]

You do get tracking with USPS first class mail, both domestically and internationally.

First class mail packages yes, first class mail letters no    If you want international tracking, you have to pay the $12+ for FCMI package rate.

[exoticelectron]

Heres the demo video of the earlier prototype in a big housing...still functionally the same as what Im working on for the relaunch though:

[exoticelectron]

Round 1 of the PCB layout for Rev 6

Key features:

Rough dimensions about 1" by 4" (25mm x 100mm)
AAA batteries will be held by BK-82 clips (about half the price of plastic holders)
Im considering changing most parts to be through hole so experimenting is easier
ICSP/debug via a small 6 pin connector I've used before, a separate header will convert it to the RJ jack for ICD2, etc..
Using a big pushbutton because its more comfortable ( D6R90F1LFS )
Found a 3V0-p buzzer thats cheap and should perform well, I'll test it before committing it to the PCB (CSQG703BP)
An LED is not needed for functionality (the calibration LED for instance) but I will try to add one anyway for experimentation

Still have some rats nest but you can see the way its going...

EDIT: The last pic is of the debug header that should allow programming at battery power and also real time debugging with MPLAB/ICD2 etc..

[exoticelectron]

Only 68 minutes left in the kickstarter campaign! Its at $3973 and it would be great to break $4000. If you are considering a deltaK please pledge! You wont be charged because the kickstarter goal is $35k and nobody gets charged unless that is met. But I will be using the KS system to stay in contact with people interested in the deltaK, and I have a bunch of major changes on the way in a few weeks regarding its design (and price!). Thanks for all the support so far! Many of the backers are from eevblog.com!! http://kickstarter.com/projects/1414732247/deltak-the-keychain-sized-thermal-scanner

[exoticelectron]

BIG NEWS

The kickstarter campaign broke $4000 by $1! Thanks to a special backer who upped their pledge at the last second. 79 backers total!! Im very excited for the relaunch.

I've just finished drawing the Rev 6 circuit board. I submitted the board today to basicpcb.com and should get 3 pieces back around May 6th! BTW it was only $31 shipped for three boards!

This new design uses the MCU + Analog thermopile (TS118-3), that worked great in the proof of concept tests I did.

The design includes the following features:

-Three sensitivity levels, selectable by a slide switch
-Big comfy pushbutton for on/off
-Yellow LED (calibration indication, but other functions possible!)
-2 x AAA batteries for huge battery life
-Plenty of speaker volume
-About 0.9" wide at the thickest part, by about 4" long

HOUSING CHANGE

The keychain sized housing will not be available. That was something I could only do in the previous kickstarter with the very high funding goal, because it needed some extra engineering to reduce the current consumption way down in order to use button cell batteries.

But, I think that you guys are okay with using a somewhat bigger design, right? It still works great and having it be as tiny as possible is really not that important for functionality. This current REV6 design is an inch shorter than a typical permanent marker and only about as wide as a quarter. Still very small. And the much longer battery life is a great thing to have.

OPEN SOURCE AND HACKABLE

Its been requested, and since the majority of people who pledged for the deltaK are into electronics, I think it could be a good way to get even more backers. Basically it would involve the following:

-Releasing the PCB layout, schematic, parts list, and firmware.
-Making the housing an add-on option. (its not required for functionality)
-A ".STL file only" housing could be an option so you could 3D print your own housing too.
-Including an ICSP debug/programming connector on the PCB. Rev 6 has this.
-Making an unsoldered kit of parts version an option, possibly with a small discount.
-Providing technical support to people who want to hack it. (my job!)
-Providing a special connector so you can plug the deltaK directly into your MPLAB ICD2 (etc..) debugger/programmer.
-Its actually a great platform for learning to work with PIC processors. Its small, battery powered, and has a minimal parts count. Plenty of interesting things you could do, and you'd be working with a real PIC!

Of course, I will still offer a fully assembled deltaK with a housing. The open source part would be a completely separate option.

Below are pics of the new rev6 PCB layout and schematic.

PRICING

I should be able to drop the price a bit, I will know more once I am sure the design is stable. Stay tuned!

[mtdoc]

The keychain sized housing will not be available. That was something I could only do in the previous kickstarter with the very high funding goal, because it needed some extra engineering to reduce the current consumption way down in order to use button cell batteries.

But, I think that you guys are okay with using a somewhat bigger design, right? It still works great and having it be as tiny as possible is really not that important for functionality. This current REV6 design is an inch shorter than a typical permanent marker and only about as wide as a quarter. Still very small. And the much longer battery life is a great thing to have.

From a medical use standpoint, I don't think it would see much use if it can't fit unobtrusively in a shirt or pants pocket - i.e. bigger than a penlight. But I realize that is not your prime market.  Just an FYI.

[mikeselectricstuff]

BIG NEWS

-Three sensitivity levels, selectable by a slide switch

Wouln't a button give more flexibility - to cycle through different sensitivities/modes, and have a different function for a long press, e.g. zeroing - I imagine drift/background temp correction will be an issue at higher sensitivities.

[exoticelectron]

The size with the housing should end up being around "highlighter size"..you know the thick highlighter markers we have here in the US. Still pocket friendly.

The slide switch is required because the gain is actually being modified in the opamp. Also I think a slide switch is better for sensitivity selection, you can select your sensitivity instantly and it positively maintains it without further interaction, especially if you need to stop and restart the scan repeatedly. But I may add some additional functionality with the button, since with the microcontroller there are lots of possibilities.

Since the device is only used for a few seconds at a time, and makes relative measurements, drift and internal offsets aren't an issue. This is because significant drift doesn't occur in the time span of seconds, and offsets of any kind are nulled out of the system at every power on when the starting point of the scan is measured for about 2 seconds. This includes opamp or ADC offsets, and of course the starting thermopile voltage which represents the starting temperature of the scan which will be used as zero.

The original design actually biased the thermopile using a special circuit, to remove all offsets from the system at startup. This new design uses the microcontroller to simply subtract it.

[exoticelectron]

I can see that a lot of effort went into designing this and I respect that.
But to me one thing is missing for this to be useful... a tiny lcd to display actual temperature.

Or a speech module to read out the max temperature.

Or a phone app that converts the tone into a temperature! Just encode the starting temperature as a higher frequency signal.

Ya I like this idea. Since the microcontroller is now in charge of everything, all kinds of fun possibilities open up, and they are all hackable sorts of projects.

Extreme bonus points if you figure out a way for the your phone to "see" where the sensor tip is in a live camera feed, and then turn the tone into a color on screen. Now you can line scan a surface and create an image! Would need a tripod of course unless you want to go absolutely crazy and try to do an augumented reality sort of thing. But I think that would be overkill and style points only

[mtdoc]

The size with the housing should end up being around "highlighter size"..you know the thick highlighter markers we have here in the US. Still pocket friendly.

Still too large to carry unobtrusively I'm afraid. 

[exoticelectron]

The last thing I'm going to do is forget about kickstarter. Right now there are about 60 people on there pledged at $43 each. If I can drop the manufacturing cost I can get them a working device without meeting the very high KS goal and they would be thrilled, and I'd still be able to pay for my time and production costs. Many of them have pledged for uses totally unrelated to electronics troubleshooting and a poll I made shows that a majority of them think they could get at least 1 other person to buy one at $43 if they had a working example to show them.

Again, not everyone in the world has a $600 smartphone they can attach a $150 thermal camera adapter to. Alot of people could use something that scans thermally but is very inexpensive. Right now there isnt an alternative I am aware of anywhere near this price, and thats before I lower it.

Consider this: making your own website would cost you maybe $10/month for domain+hosting* plus $9/month for a cheap Shopify or similar service to take credit cards. You can have images, videos, whatever you like, and you don't get the weird reputation projects managed through Kickstarter have.

Kickstarter charges 8% plus 20 cents per pledge. That's $3.12 per device - in the quantities you're looking at, that could be the difference between being in the red and breaking even. If you're selling 60 devices, that's $180 you don't get - ten times as much as you'd be paying for your own shop.

Edit: here's a site which I've seen have pretty good success: https://shop.exploitee.rs/

* I run a site which cost $0.88/year for the domain and $0.03/month for hosting.

I already have a website and an online store for my other products, which takes credit cards. Kickstarter is fantastic for exposure, and the sky is the limit if you make a crowd pleaser.  I wouldn't have anywhere near 79 backers right now without it. I've already had a successful kickstarter for another product and have worked all the kickstarter fees into the budget for deltaK. Even at just 79 backers there is enough profit to pay for development and make it a success in my eyes.

BTW if you are paying $10 / month for domain and hosting plus $9 /month for an online store you can do alot better. Check out namecheap.com and square.com.  I pay about $40 / year for domain + hosting, and square charges about 3% per transaction with no monthly fee.

That said I might not relaunch on kickstarter. In fact there might not be a "relaunch"at all. Instead I might just put the item in the online store and let all the existing backers buy it. On the other hand, with the new "hackable" and open source design, it might be a good idea to relaunch on kickstarter and see if I can add any more backers.

[frozenfrogz]

Personally i have very mixed feelings in regard to Kickstarter and the bunch of other platforms out there.
We did a successful raise of 110.000€ for a product on Indiegogo. This helped to bring an idea into life and built the foundation of a now healthy little company.
At least for electronic products in a niche market, you need to do a lot of "pre-heating" before the campaign starts, get prototypes into the right hands (bloggers, magazines,...) and during the campaign you need to push your product to every place and portal you can think of - it is a lot of work.
If on the other hand, you "just" setup a campaign page this will most likely not give you the exposure you need. I would bet, going along with what you already started here, talking to us about where the project is going and later on presenting the final solution you came up with, would result in a lot more than 80 orders.
You could also go for a solid pre-order approach here.

I think, that this scanner of yours is a viable, helpful tool. I also like the look of your initial black housing with the white lettering. I can see myself purchasing a bunch of these for myself and to give it to good friends that are also active in the world of wild pixies and the circuit circus*.
However, I am a little biased against the give/take ratio Kickstarter offers.

Kind regards,
Frederik

*sorry for the AvEism here

[exoticelectron]

Personally i have very mixed feelings in regard to Kickstarter and the bunch of other platforms out there.
We did a successful raise of 110.000€ for a product on Indiegogo. This helped to bring an idea into life and built the foundation of a now healthy little company.
At least for electronic products in a niche market, you need to do a lot of "pre-heating" before the campaign starts, get prototypes into the right hands (bloggers, magazines,...) and during the campaign you need to push your product to every place and portal you can think of - it is a lot of work.
If on the other hand, you "just" setup a campaign page this will most likely not give you the exposure you need. I would bet, going along with what you already started here, talking to us about where the project is going and later on presenting the final solution you came up with, would result in a lot more than 80 orders.
You could also go for a solid pre-order approach here.

I think, that this scanner of yours is a viable, helpful tool. I also like the look of your initial black housing with the white lettering. I can see myself purchasing a bunch of these for myself and to give it to good friends that are also active in the world of wild pixies and the circuit circus*.
However, I am a little biased against the give/take ratio Kickstarter offers.

Kind regards,
Frederik

*sorry for the AvEism here

Thanks Frederik this is very interesting!

The tiny keychain sized black and white housing was my attempt to give the deltaK a gadget look which would have some mass appeal and broader market. But I dont think that worked as well as I liked, according to a poll I did, the overwhelming number of backers will be using it for electronics troubleshooting or engineering purposes. This is great! But now I am going to focus on the electronics folks, so I am opening up the design to be open source and hackable, with less focus on tiny size. Its still very small just not really really tiny. I'll try to keep the housing cool looking though!

Congrats on a huge success with KS, I'm surprised you still have mixed feelings! By give/take ratio you mean the amount of work you had to do to pre-market the product, or literally the % KS takes?

[frozenfrogz]

Congrats on a huge success with KS, I'm surprised you still have mixed feelings! By give/take ratio you mean the amount of work you had to do to pre-market the product, or literally the % KS takes?

I am totally fine with the work that needed to go into the campaign by everybody involved. That is obligatory and adds to the fun, as soon as you can take a breath again. xD Just in a retrospective I think that Indiegogo is really greedy (and at that time Indiegogo was a lot cheaper than Kickstarter!). I do not know about the current conditions, but the amount of money that goes to the platform is excessive in regard to the service you are getting. After all we are just talking about a fiduciary combined with a blog site / basic shop system.
On the other hand I see the huge potential in crowd-funding and through this kind of platforms, a lot of very cool projects were brought to life.
So that is why I wrote "mixed feelings".

[Kilrah]

Those who created these platforms certainly must be having a good life. Probably doesn't get any better in terms of income per amount of work ratio.

[exoticelectron]

Circuit boards came in from BasicPCB today!!! Woohoo! It was only $30 for 3 and they came in ahead of schedule. Cant wait to try out the new design. Unfortunately digikey parts wont be here for another couple days so until then I can just look at the boards lol

http://www.basicpcb.com

[CJay]

Nice gadget and I reckon it could be very useful indeed but I *guarantee* I will still burn my fingers touching whatever component it identifies as overheating

[exoticelectron]

DirtyPCBs will get you 10-12 2"x2" boards for $10. Just for reference

The hong kong post shipping thats included with dirtypcb's takes forever. Its worth it to spend $15 extra to get a USA supplier and delivery from order placement in a much shorter and more predictable timeframe. But I might use dirtypcb's for other stuff thats on the back burner so to speak

[exoticelectron]

Parts got here a couple days ago but I wasn't able to spend time on this project until right now! So I am going to solder it up and see what blows up

[exoticelectron]

First tests of Rev 6!

There are some minor changes I would like to make but overall the major functions, are working as expected!

The video shows both the super-high sensitivity mode detecting a thumb print on cardboard, then switching to the high temperature range to scan a soldering iron!

The code is written in C and is very simple, using a state machine with three states and interrupt driven tone generation and delay timing.

Memory space is as follows:

Memory Summary:
    Program space        used   1F9h (   505) of   400h words   ( 49.3%)
    Data space           used    26h (    38) of    40h bytes   ( 59.4%)

No floating point is used which saved a TON of memory space.

So now everything is under microcontroller control..the temperature data, tone, and LED can all be manipulated at will for who knows what features and goodies! Custom code can be uploaded using an ICD2 and MPLAB, or equivalent..I brought out the ICSP interface to the on-board 6 pin header, along with a small RJ45 adapter that will be included as an option.

Now I just need to make an .STL housing and it should be ready for relaunch soon.

https://youtu.be/L5sp5n7XT2E

[frozenfrogz]

Nice to see the progress 

I wrote you a pm regarding the encasement design - don’t know if you’ve seen it.
Also I was thinking: To get back on the request for a version for the hearing impaired. Maybe an adapted version with a small vibration motor could be easily done. Miniature vibrtion motors are available in a lot of different variations and there are some that can run of 0.3V to 3V and a couple of mA. Battery life will most likely be less than with the speaker however.

[exoticelectron]

Nice to see the progress 

I wrote you a pm regarding the encasement design - don’t know if you’ve seen it.
Also I was thinking: To get back on the request for a version for the hearing impaired. Maybe an adapted version with a small vibration motor could be easily done. Miniature vibrtion motors are available in a lot of different variations and there are some that can run of 0.3V to 3V and a couple of mA. Battery life will most likely be less than with the speaker however.

I design all the housings for my projects myself but thank you for the offer. The vibrating modification would be a great project since its open source.