Yet another cheap thermal imager incoming.. Seek Thermal

[frenky]

hands up here, i am a fan of therm-App as well    and the lenses are best, germanium made . evilish cool 

Frenky, i saw you posted pics of your seek thermal cam + 50mm ZnSe and even 100mm ZnSe. can you tell us where did u buy those lenses? how much did they cost? i am sure they are beyond the use and sale of CO2 intended use too. i didnt know they sell ZnSe 100mm!
and how did the 50mm performs better than 100mm? or am i missing something here? idk

I bought them from http://stores.ebay.com/bingo929 but it seems that the store is closed.

I have found seller that sells lens with the same specs as are mine:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=230838327998&rmvSB=true

The main difference betwen 50mm and 100mm is the focus distance (which is approximately the same as focal length in this case).
So 50mm lens have focus at 50mm distance and 100mm at 100mm...

Beacuse with 50mm lens you can get closer you will get bigger magnification:
https://goo.gl/photos/rqbcTgg9avkcPtiH9

100mm:
https://goo.gl/photos/ij5UBm96k2mm7Nuq8

My suggestion would be to buy both.

[Fraser]

There appears to be confusion here.

I believe Termal lee is trying to make a telescope with a large diameter objective lens.

Freaky is referring to the FL of the lens and not the diameter. Close up lenses made from ZnSe are usually less than 20mm in diameter and come in a range of FL distances. Common examples are 50mm, 63mm, 75mm, 100mm.

Larger diameter lenses than 20mm cost a lot more as they are not mass produced products like those made in China for CO2 laser work

GaAs lenses are also suitable for thermal camera close up lens s and are reasonably priced when bought for CO2 laser applications. They offer greater hardness, so do not scratch so easily, but are not as good as ZnSe when it comes to transmission.

As many know, GASIR is also available, and though it looks like Germanium it is not. It is an affordable option in cheaper cameras and so is common in sub $10K cameras. Germanium still remains the choice for professional applications but has eye watering costs associated with it.

Fraser

[frenky]

From his posts I gathered that he wants to observe plants from close.
In this case the 20mm dia ZnSe + Flir Lepton core with breakout board could work (IMHO).
http://www.pureengineering.com/projects/lepton

[Fraser]

Hi Frenky,

He has been asking me about telescope lens construction with large ZnSe elements via PM. Your information on close up lenses will no doubt be useful to him though. 

Fraser

[frenky]

My mistake I got confused with info from "sguyader" who is doing plant research and will need close-up lens.

[Uho]

termal lee asked in PM on my telephoto lens
I spent two years doing a telephoto lens. Theoretically, it is not difficult. For those who have access to the lens custom-made. And pick up the serial lens is difficult. There is a problem of optical distortion. Therefore, the price of a telephoto lens no can be very low.

[termal lee]

Fraser and Uho is right. i am a newbie in this field, and i want to make litle experinent with the cheapest lens possible, to get most of my seek cam.

i gathered some nice infos from Frenky's answer too, so thanks for that.

Uho makes 3x magnification tele, which is prety nice. it is just i have this cheaper stuffs i wanna tinker around with, and u guys come with helpful infos. thanks everybody 

[sguyader]

Thanks Frenky for the tips regarding lenses. In fact for my own research project, I'll need closups of small plant leaf areas (a couple centimeters wide), but other people in my research institute will be interested in larger field views to record temperature differences of entire plants in crop fields (a couple meters wide).
So we could acquire several lenses to adapt the use of the camera to the field of view we need.

In your post #2002 above, which camera did you use to take the pictures you shared ? It seems it has a better resolution than the Lepton/FLIR One.

[frenky]

I used the first model of SeekThermal with this PC software (Reply #19):
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/seekthermal-how-to-correct-the-image-received-from-the-sensor/

[eneuro]

It seems it has a better resolution than the Lepton/FLIR One.

Of course, FLIR One without its crappy visual camera overlay can only produce... thermal blobs 

Anyway, I suggest you use OpenCV with GPU accelerated critical parts and with custom lens and depending on your application (how fast thermal image changes) you could think of circular motion to get rid of those "pattent" blacked pixels which create this hexagon pattern  and get even better resolution not affected by those dead pixels

I've made custom Seek library but no plans for the moment to release this, since I want have cheap thermal vision technology advantage in one of my research projects, but when decent amount of money will be made and maybe oryginal Seek Thermal API available, maybe I will release some code, however it is Unix (Linux) based-I do not support Window$ , because of I forgot about this OS many years ago 

[in.Vitro]

Of course, FLIR One without its crappy visual camera overlay can only produce... thermal blobs 

And thats why I am uncertain about the Seek. I think the resolution is better than the FLIR One (except the noise, but Photoshop will fix it! ) but the fact that you have radiometric jpgs is one other thing..

I've tested the Seek a few weeks and I love it (btw. is it possible to connect the iOS Version to a PC?) and I will buy the FLIR One when its possible to get one to test it out.

[sguyader]

It seems it has a better resolution than the Lepton/FLIR One.

Of course, FLIR One without its crappy visual camera overlay can only produce... thermal blobs 

Anyway, I suggest you use OpenCV with GPU accelerated critical parts and with custom lens and depending on your application (how fast thermal image changes) you could think of circular motion to get rid of those "pattent" blacked pixels which create this hexagon pattern  and get even better resolution not affected by those dead pixels

I've made custom Seek library but no plans for the moment to release this, since I want have cheap thermal vision technology advantage in one of my research projects, but when decent amount of money will be made and maybe oryginal Seek Thermal API available, maybe I will release some code, however it is Unix (Linux) based-I do not support Window$ , because of I forgot about this OS many years ago 

For my research purpose, I guess I need radiometric measurements, and to be able to transform those readings to (at least relative) temperatures. I intend to use something like a Raspberry Pi to contol the camera and acquire data, so yes it will be running Linux. Data analyses will then be made on a more powerful computer using R statistical software.

[bsliv]

Yippee.  Seek sent me a link to download their sdk.  Now I need a project.

[termal lee]

I AM NUMBER 2015. YEAH !!!   O0

[sguyader]

Yippee.  Seek sent me a link to download their sdk.  Now I need a project.

Good news! Do you think this could allow developers to get the maximum out of the seek thermal?

[Bud]

Pictures from Costco Canada web site.  They were not made with seek, were they?


Source page is here
http://www.costco.ca/SEEK-Thermal-XR-Camera-for-Smartphone-%e2%80%93-Android.product.100224761.html

[casinada]

I don't know anything about this site but they sell the device for $165 
https://www.touchofmodern.com/sales/seek-thermal-122ab573-8e1f-4c03-884f-829ad93a1a60/seek-thermal

I haven't followed this thread much so I don't know if anybody posted this before me. A quick search of the eevblog forum didn't return anything.

I have no relationship with the site in any way and never purchased anything from them. I was looking for something else and stumbled upon this site. 

[frenky]

They are probably trying to get rid of old stock because Seek no longer sells this model.
The new model has focus ring:

[in.Vitro]

They were not made with seek, were they?

Even the "new" focusible Seek Compact has the same image quality as the old one...

[termal lee]

Bud, thats not from seek. maybe from therm-app or even other higher resolution cameras. even with focusable seek xr, no way u can get to that resolution

[mikeselectricstuff]

Just had this message on my Seek teardown vid :

Tracy Benson 4 hours ago
Hi Mike, we are now available in Europe on Amazon across major countries!  We'd love to have to tear down our next newest device about to break news soon.  Shoot me an email at <redacted>@thermal.com and I'll reach back out to you directly.

Stay tuned....

[TheSteve]

Just had this message on my Seek teardown vid :

Tracy Benson 4 hours ago
Hi Mike, we are now available in Europe on Amazon across major countries!  We'd love to have to tear down our next newest device about to break news soon.  Shoot me an email at <redacted>@thermal.com and I'll reach back out to you directly.

Stay tuned....

Well done! Can't wait...

[frenky]

Perhaps they will release bigger thermal module in the class of Therm-App or i3-thermalExpert? (Because they renamed existing one to "compact").
That would really be good for us hobby users. Ofcourse if the price was right.

[eneuro]

Yippee.  Seek sent me a link to download their sdk.  Now I need a project.

Good news! Do you think this could allow developers to get the maximum out of the seek thermal?

I do not think so, they will give you only this what they want to give and nothing more, but we'll see 

Thank you for your interest in our Seekware SDK. We are piloting a limited, pre-release cycle and need some information from you about your project and preferred SDK Platform.

At this time we are accepting U.S. participation only. We will be expanding, so if you are outside the U.S. please register and stay tuned.

Again stupid restrictions "we are accepting U.S. participation only". I'm waiting for public release-I haven't got time to debug their software looking for bugs in first versions for free... 

[mikeselectricstuff]

Perhaps they will release bigger thermal module in the class of Therm-App or i3-thermalExpert? (Because they renamed existing one to "compact").
That would really be good for us hobby users. Ofcourse if the price was right.

My guess would be either a standalone camera or maybe a drone cam.