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<\/p>\nRecently I got myself a new toy, which is actually a very useful toy, a thermal camera! The one I got was used from eBay, a FLIR ONE Pro „for Android“ with USB type-C connector, this is how it looks like:<\/p>\n
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This is a pretty neat device as it attaches directly to the USB type–C port of a mobile phone (or other device). There is a second type-C connector on it which is only used for charging the internal battery. Why they included this is a bit beyond me, maybe they anticipated that not all Android phones would be able supply enough juice? The most important part though is the thermal image sensor. In the Pro version this has a resolution of 160×120 pixel and a thermal range from -20C to +400C! Additionally there is a regular visible light camera included which can be used to overlay a visible picture onto the thermal (IR) one.<\/p>\n
The main reason why I bought it was because I needed to debug some embedded electronics with it. Sound weird? Well yes, it may. Sometimes during development you end up in the situation that your circuit still consumes too much energy and you have no idea why, the only thing you do know that it shouldn’t. In a former project I spent weeks chasing down some 10mA and was not able to find it. What makes it so hard is that first you do not know if it is a software or hardware problem. And once you settle on the software side in many designs you quickly drown in possible options – so many pins, so many functions, so many components. And these all have to play nice together! You have to be sure what each and every component does at any given time or you may end up inadvertently driving two signals against each other or feeding power though a logic line to some component.<\/p>\n
Since electrical energy in circuits is turned into heat, a thermal camera is an awesome way to at least start to spot which of your components on a PCB gets warm. And if you are lucky, you know that it shouldn’t and can then look closer why this very thing still consumes power. In the before mentioned case we indeed found the sucker, which was a level shifter that got powered down in suspend but the host CPU was still driving a logic signal to – bam!<\/p>\n
My current target for analysis is the Purism Librem 5 phone and seeing which of the components draws most energy to then hunt them all down \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
So the FLIR ONE Pro I got is intended for Android and with the FLIR Android app from the Google app store it works pretty much out of the box which is nice! The app has a bunch of nice features to play with and does it’s job. One nasty bit is though that FLIR always superimposes their company logo into the images takes, which is a bit annoying. But this is a USB device:<\/p>\n
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