HT-301 stunning car with no engine

[EE-digger]

Received mine yesterday and out of 5 Android devices, it can only compose a real thermal image on one of them.

The stock app is too limited for anything but a snapshot.  Measurement spots / markers are a mess.  Touch the 3 dot measure icon and you get high, low, etc. but touch the screen again and drag and you end up with markers everywhere.  Can't move them without them spawning, can't delete them.

Lack of thermographic output (out of the box) and this thing is half way back to my UPS dropoff point.

Thermview Pro in theory works for a wired camera but shows no detection at all of this unit.

The simple image that is produced is absolutely stunning next to my E60 or older PM675.  To my somewhat trained eyes, looks more like 640x even though it is 384x.

So promising but so sad.  As a life long hw/sw developer recently retired, I have no intention of making thermographic data out of this unit into a career.

So in 2025, is there any app out there that supports this camera and has a chance of working on better than 1 in 5 Android devices?

added - even the camera click sound works on one of the devices which, unfortunately, cannot produce an image, and NO other.  The screen shows pieces of an image, broken into 2 or more area with what looks equivalent to a H sync or V sync between regions, and these jump around.

[Fraser]

Whilst discussing the F1G2 dongle camera with the VP of the FLIR division I was told that developing a Dongle thermal camera for Android was a bit of a nightmare. He said that was why they developed such a camera for the Apple iOS first. With iOS the hardware platform and OS are well defined and far easier to code for as a result. FLIR were able to fine tune the FLIR APP to achieve best performance on the iOS platform and once that was achieved, they looked at how to create an equivalent APP for Android based phones. They had to start with a baseline hardware platform and they chose the Samsung S5 as that was a current model with enough processing power for the task. Once the Android APP was developed and running well on the Samsung S5, the project tested it with other mobile phone hardware and OS platforms and that was where the trouble began. There are so many permutations of Android phone hardware and OS versions that maintaining compatibility of the APP became a real challenge. The symptoms of incompatibilities ranged from “camera not seen” to the APP working but the frame rate was slow or other weird symptoms. At some point FLIR had to decide to release the APP with a caveat that it had only been tested and proven to work on certain phones running a particular OS. The problem was that the phone OS updates could break the APP on even those previously working phones. Continuous monitoring and development of the Android APP was required. All in all, Dongle thermal cameras for Android are a bit of a nightmare for manufacturers who are committed to their customers and wish to maintain their products compatibility with new hardware and OS versions.

I can see how a Chinese Dongle thermal camera could suffer incompatibility with versions of Android phone hardware and OS’s for which it was not directly developed and tested. The APP’s are easily broken and there can even be hardware and driver incompatibilities at the USB level. I personally chose to buy Samsung phones for my camera dongles as they are sort of a ‘standard’ that thermal dongle camera manufacturers support well. I have yet to have a compatibility issue with the phones I have. I think my oldest is an S5 and newest is an S9.

Regarding the excellent imagery provided by the HT-301….. great advances have been made on the image processing side of thermal cameras. Interpolation, edge enhancement, contrast enhancement, Super Resolution, AI enhancement and various other image improving techniques are often employed to provide a prettier picture for the user. On the radiometric side of things, it is important to capture the raw pixel data for measurements rather than after image enhancement has taken place to avoid corruption of the measurement data. Some cameras actually have the option to save enhanced simple RGB “pretty pictures” or accurate (not enhanced) radiometric images that may be analysed at the pixel level later.
Fraser

[EE-digger]

For my last six working years, I designed medical devices.  For one body worn delivery system, the client wanted compatibility with something like 150 cell phones by brand, vintage, OS, OS version.  This list was whittled down to 89 phones and handed to an outside service with clear objectives and a decent testing plan.  This went fairly well and there were really no show stoppers.  All I can say is that the app was well structured and written and got along ok.

On Android, it was nothing but a PITA with Bluetooth design.  End up sticking with published Apple specifications for timing and protocol.

The little HT-301 has gone bye-bye.  Almost going glossy eyed with camera specs for the past week (fortunately, the grass is now growing and will occupy some of this "spare" time, I seem to be looking at mostly half baked apps.  My 5 Android devices range from 1.5 to 5 years old and all OS well within the minimum required.  This camera did not fully function on ANY of them.

Infiray (Xinfrared) seems to have its act together in many ways.  It's also a very impressive operation.  Unfortunately, most of the "better" performance cell phone cameras seem to be unobtanium.  We'll see how the picture looks in mid year after the tariff dust has settled.  I'm after:

25 Hz frame rate minimum
prefer 384 x resolution native, possibly 240 x with X3 active
400C upper temperature limit
fully functional firmware and SW app

To "de-glaze" my eyes, I've refocused on my E60 and getting the best close up / macro lens I can put on it.  The lens on my PM675 works fairly well on it but I don't recall the focal length.  I have another post this morning with a few IR optic questions.