Work on Thermal Camera 5.22.15

5.22.15
Time: 2 hours
Joel and Max

Our two Seniors decided to come back in to school today to work on the thermal camera on their day off. They are doing a great job of leading by example and they deserve a pat on the back for their efforts.

As background information, Dairland Power asked if we could investigate a thermal camera which could be mounted onto the UAV to inspect the transmission lines. This would detect high resistance areas (which would appear hot to the thermal camera) like bad connections. Thermal imaging has become a core predictive maintenance tool in ongoing inspection programs to help prevent possible outages.

We have not spent much time working on our thermal camera. With the UAV in the final testing stages, switched our focus on finishing up the thermal camera.

We originally wanted to mount the camera on the UAV, however, when we looked at the cost to minimize our design we felt this was way out of our budget. Commercial models sell for $10,000. We still wanted to see what we could do so we found a schematic online for a thermal camera. With the parts we purchased on eBay and other locations, we kept the price under $160. Please note that this design will be too big to mount on the UAV. It is well outside of our budget to miniaturize it.

We had done quite a bit of testing of the design on a breadboard a couple months ago, so now we just had to solder everything to the prototype board.

Below is the schematic for the thermal camera idea we found at Central Nexus Thermal Cameras. Now we just had to build it and get the code to work on our Arduino.

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Solding up a prototype shield with our inputs to the camera. We are using a Cat5 cable as our wiring harness. The thermal sensor will be moved by two servo motors controlled by the Arduino.

We bought a $10 Microsoft webcam on ebay and are using it as our camera source.

Cutting out a plastic box with holes/opening for all of our cables.

Here you see the top of the case with a servo motor mounted. We had to do some extensive modifications to the case to make it all fit.

The most expensive part on our camera is the MELEXIS Compensated Infra Red Thermometer. This cost $60. It is has some nice features for the price, operates on 3-5 volts and can sense  0 - 50 degrees C. We also had to solder in a logic converter to go from 3.3 volts to 5 volts. This helps us go from the Arduino to the Melexis.


Future Goals:
We will complete the assembly next week and test it out. We plan to use a hand warmer behind a wall to see if it will detect the thermal image.