Good morning all today! I'm looking at a thermal imaging camera. This is the top! Don Tc004 It's a gun style thermal imaging camera which has its own built-in LCD and it's a high resolution sensor in here 256 by 192. a quick look at what's in the box. there's a case, there's a product certificate, and there's also a calibration certificate UK Uh, plug-in USB Power Supply a USB to type C cable, and also a 16 gig micro SD card.

So let's peel the screen protector sheet, install the micro SD card into the slot on the top here, and switch the unit on, press and hold the power switch for a few seconds the screen comes on. It does take a little while to boot up. There's obviously, um, quite a bit of software in here and here it is on with the display running right. Let's put my hand on the green mat here and just transfer some heat to it and there.

You can quite clearly see my hand print and that will remain for as long as the heat stays in the mat. Okay, looking around for something warm. If I tip the camera up, you can see there. my Ihd, that's my in-home display for the smart meter.

The hottest point of that is Max 25.9 and that's also what the top of the temperature scale is set to. The minimum temperature the camera can see is the green marker there that's 17 point something. It's also a mirrored down here 17 degrees. So the scale is constantly changing between the Min temperature that the camera's seeing and the max temperature that the camera's seeing the temperature up here 18.6 is the center temperature which is the white marker.

Here this is the battery display symbol. No problems with batteries running out on this thing because it's got a built-in 5 amp hour Lithium battery and here you can see the emissivity is set to 0.95 Now you can see I've turned my torch on here, my flashlight and the camera is starting to pick that up around 25 degrees at the top of the flashlight there. Okay, let's go through these. Keys here.

This is the playback button. so Jpegs and H.264 videos that you record on the SD card. you can play them back here. This is a little light switch if you press it for a second two LEDs White LEDs Come on on the front of the camera, press it again to turn them off.

This is the on off switch and this is the back button. If I press the middle button of the joystick area. Here it goes into the menu system and there are three parameters. This to this measurement parameters, your choice of palette and a settings menu.

So let's start with palette because that's relatively straightforward. You've got the black and white ones where it's white hot or you can also choose black is hot, you've got iron, and you've got rainbow. So just four palettes. It's kept relatively simple.

This is really all you need. So that's white is hot, that's black is hot iron, which is the palette that you normally see on thermal imaging images, and rainbow which is just a bit more colorful. So I'll leave it on iron. Press the back button to get out of that one.

Back to the measurement menu. This is also very simple. You can choose whether to have the white spot on the red spot on that's the max, the Green Spot Min on, or on this one. You can actually disable all the spots and have no measurement markers on there at all.

Curiously, you have to individually switch these back on, but it doesn't take too long. Okay, let's go back and now across the settings and in here there's a fair bit more stuff. I'm just going to take a quick look at the manual. It highlights the elements on the front and the elements on the rear.

The switches mainly items included how to use the camera in USB mode, so connect it to your PC via the USB cable specifications, facts, and that's pretty much it. So the point is, there's nothing in the manual about all these menu elements. You just go through it and work it out for yourself. So so in measure parameter, you've got emissivity.

Now you can pretty much leave it at 0.95 There are some materials that have a different emissivity, but then you start getting into complex areas like reflectivity. so probably best just to leave it there. Uh, Temperature is the ambient temperature of the room which can affect readings. Um.

distance is the distance you are away from the object you're measuring I've set mine to half a meter. Um, this Uh is used because as the infrared energy comes off an object over long distances or over distances, it disperses because of the atmosphere, the air. So it does a slight modification of the temperature reading based on how far away you are from the object. This is to get the temperature reading as accurate as it can.

Temperature Scale: There are two temperature scales minus 20 to 150 degrees C for low temperature objects or 100 to 350 degrees C for high temperature objects. and when you change this setting, it takes a little while to reconfigure the camera. High and low Alerts: Fairly self-explanatory. You can switch on an alert.

If you you see a temperature above a certain number, switch on a an alert. If you see a temperature below a certain number, an LED Alert I Don't know I assume it turns on these front LEDs Photo setting is you can either auto save the photos or you can ask for a confirmation screen. Our temperature unit gives you Celsius Fahrenheit Also Kelvin If you want to use Kelvin Uh, the next few are very straightforward. You can set the date and time here.

That's for time stamping the images. You can set the language to check how many languages there are. Oh, there are quite a few of those. Uh, display brightness I Think as I said, there are three levels: Auto timeout after a period of time and systems settings.

Uh, you can factory reset the unit. You can format the SD card. you can go into USB mode so that, um, this is a it works like a webcam and then you can have live images transferred to the PC although of course you're subject to the length of your USB cable and there's some device information on firmware versions, memory capacity, and the serial number. Now, just looking at the resolution of this camera, this heatsink has been on the central heating radiator to warm it up, and you can see here that there is a fair bit of detail there.

So you don't need an optical camera because older thermal imaging cameras had an optical camera and you could mix the optical image with the thermal image because it was very difficult to see from the thermal image what you were actually looking at. so you needed the optical image Blended over the top of it to see what you're looking at. But with this, there's absolutely no issue with resolution. It's pretty clear what we're looking at there, and here's a side-by-side comparison of the thermal imaging camera on the right with an older generation thermal imaging camera on the left, which had a resolution of just 60 by 60 pixels.

and that's why they gave you the option to Overlay the optical image because if you look at just the thermal image, it's very difficult to see what you're looking at. I mean compare the detail when you've got 256 by 192 pixels. It's a completely different ball game, right? Let's take a couple of uh, Jpeg Jpeg images of this heatsink and you can see my flashlight just above the heatsink. So I'll just pull the trigger briefly.

Now you get the confirmation box there. Save if I want to save that I press the middle button. that's fine. I could get rid of that by having the auto save thing.

so I'll just reposition that and get one more image by pressing the trigger. save. Press the middle button to confirm that I want to save that. And now we'll have a quick look at the desktop software where you can reanalyze these images.

So let's connect the USB type-c connector into the socket on the top of the camera, head over to the PC and see what we can see. So here we are in: TD view. Now you can download this software from Top Don's website Topdon.com It'll start you off with a couple of folders here, but they're in program files. so I added another folder which I just put on my desktop called top Don and in there I've got those two images that I took from the thermal camera I Just transferred them from the SD card over to this folder.

Now in here, you can see that you've got the JPEG files, but you've also got these IRG files and that contains the raw thermal image data so that when you open these, you can do more with them than just look at the jpeg. So let's take a look at. well, let's look at this one. Um, for some reason this doesn't go full size screen, but you've got these various uh controls here to look at multiple images at once and if you do that and then go back to the image, it comes up full size.

Not quite sure why. Um, on. Here we can do things like take a measurement at an arbitrary point there. We can also draw a line and it'll give you minimum and maximum temperatures on that line.

We can draw a square and it'll give you minimum and maximum temperatures in that region and you can add as many of these elements as you want as a circular one there and so on and I can delete all of those if I choose to. Now because we're looking at the raw thermal imaging data and not just the Jpeg, we can actually change things like the palette. So I can have this in a white hot palette or black hot which actually looks a bit more like a black and white visual image. Um, I can also have rainbow and there are some here that aren't even on the camera like lava and this one which is red gray so it's essentially black and white but with uh, red elements for the highest temperatures.

Um, other things you can do here: rotate the image, save the image, save it, save the data as CSV um or export a report in word format. There's also this which is a nice 3D image so you can see here. we can take a look at the 3D data. I'm just spinning it around using the right button on my mouse and you can very clearly see the heatsinks fins there.

but as a 3D heat model now as you can imagine, Um, like most software, Suites there's an absolute mass of stuff you can do in here, so I'm going to leave it there. Keep this video reasonably short and I'll look now at some use cases that I've put the thermal imaging camera to to actually get some useful things done. So the first use case for the thermal imaging camera is this cryptocurrency Miner which one runs for a while but then crashes and I'm thinking it might be the control board on the top here because the main hashing boards down there. we'll have a look at them through the thermal imaging camera.

Um, they're hot, but they're cooled by the centrifugal fan at the back, so it's expected that they're hot and their temperature is 60 degrees. That's entirely normal. But what about this controller board? I'm getting a high temperature on there of about 30 degrees and I'm just wondering if that's a bit hot and I'm thinking most of the heat there's probably coming from the system on a chip and it's not actively called. the controller board on the top, there has no fan cooling the little fan on the front.

There is to cool the um power supply components on the hashing boards, but I could perhaps put a piece of pipe behind this fan and run it into the covered area on this controller board and that might blow enough warm air out of that to cool it down. It actually works if it's sitting here with no cover. but I have made this wooden piece that sits on the top and I just wonder whether it's getting so hot under that cover that that's why it's losing contact with the internet and it stops mining cryptocurrency. But curiously, it carries on with the A6 hot.

so it carries on using Power 62 degrees the A6r there. Now the other use case I'm looking at is this: Loft hatch cover. Um, it's just pieces of board held together with two cross boards and you can just see the staining on there because it does tend to go moldy and that's really I think because it's so cold. um, the water condenses on it and uh, anything that's permanently wet will attract mold.

so let's have a look at it through the thermal imaging camera. and yes, I mean we can see that it's certainly colder on the underside of that Loft hatch cover than the surrounding ceiling by about three degrees. It's not a huge amount. it's not a particularly cold day outside today, but certainly you can see very clearly on this display that that is colder than its surrounding uh, ceiling parts.

so it's very easy to see where or why mold is appearing in certain areas. and just returning to the cryptocurrency miner. um, a day later, I've solved the problem. You can see from the display here that the system on a chip which is directly under the red marker there currently showing 30 degrees, but I had seen that I've just switched this on that had got up to 40 degrees and that's pretty hot for a semiconductor and I think that's why this was crashing.

So I came up with the solution and it worked and my temporary solution is simply this to just put a fan on that control board and it's blowing air through I've removed the Um face plate on the other end I've got airflow through and that now mines continuously without crashing, so that's fixed the problem. so that's a little. Look at the top. Dawn Tc004 Thermal Imaging camera I Will put additional information and links in the description below, but for now, Cheerio.