New thermal toy

I've got a new toy!

I've been drooling after thermal cameras for a while but the price has always been a bit too much to justify purchase. Just now however there was a sufficiently good deal and now I got myself a new Flir E4.

While it is not necessary for most of my stuff, it certainly is useful occasionally. It got its first actual use the day I got it. This PCB was returned with note that it had essentially random failures. I tested it (with usual functional tests) and could not find a fault. Then something else came up and I forget it on the desk for a while. Later I came back and PCB felt hot -- that's wrong, it shouldn't heat up enough to notice. So whip out the camera and what do I see;

Lower hot part is voltage regulator (buck converter), upper hot spot is MCU. No need to look further, that one is ready for junk pile. Faulty MCU means that there's no point trying to fix it, too much trouble for too little gain. To compare, here's properly working board on left (note the details, damn the multispectral tech in E4 is useful!), bad on right. Converter still heats up a bit on properly boardbut not even close to the other one (and yes, I let other one cool down first and turned these on at same time.)

Then playing with it a bit more for fun. Here's our dog, with hit hot eyes and cold nose.

On evening it's sauna time. Stones on of the (electric) heater top are pretty hot as expected, but the sides are surprisingly cool. Not that I'll go and touch them when sauna's hot anyway.

Since it's winter, I also went outside to look for hot spots in our house walls. Not surprising that windows leak a lot of heat, but otherwise I couldn't notice any specific hot (leakage) spots. I'll need to do more testing, those images are actually quite hard to interpret.

I know that there is that hack available for upgrading E4, but so far I haven't tried that. Gotta try that sometime, more thermal resolution would be nice. My main annoyance as it is now is the thermal scale; auto is pretty much useless for when you want to compare different shots (scale changes making easy checks impossible) and locking takes current reading but doesn't allow you to set low and high limits. Not good either.