Rob Hopeless: 2012

Friday, December 14, 2012

IR-Blue Kickstarter

The Kickstarter is live now. Please check it out and support us if you like it. Thanks!

The contest for naming the IR-Blue has ended. Since the name came from an external source we have drawn a name from all the submissions and the winner is....

Mike Donovan!

Monday, October 22, 2012

Bluetooth 4 on IOS is working well. Here are a few pictures saved from the latest version. It is now using OpenGL ES 2 for rendering so it performs much better. It also makes it easier to smooth the temperature readings overlay to look better. Still working on auto-ranging the color ranges and I need to add a few more color ranges to pick from.

Motherboard of a running PC, the CPU heatsink works well

The chipset is a little hot

My hand

Where my hand was shows warmer for a while after

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Open Source info for the TIPIC

The what? TIPIC, Thermal Imaging Phone I....uh Camera. OK, I'm horrible with names for my projects. Any ideas? I'll give a free Thermal Imaging Phone Camera Accessory thing when they are ready to the person that comes up with the best name.

Yum!

Anyway, on to the Open Source Hardware thing. Phil Torrone's article The Unspoken Rules of Open Source Hardware has some very good information on what seems to be the current state of OSHW, or possibly how it should be anyway. There are also some good points in a response by Ian Lesnet in A Culture of Ethics In Open Source Hardware. So I am trying to be a good community member and share info on my projects while still trying to make a living at OSHW. We'll see how it goes!

What I have for you today is the Arduino code I used in the video. It is available at github.com/RHWorkshop/TIPIC-Arduino It still needs a lot of work but I wanted to get a prototype working for the Instructables contest. Also, a quick Fritzing sketch of the bread board for this is here. I will have the iPhone code posted very soon I just have to clean up a lot of confusing and or unused stuff. It will be available at github.com/RHWorkshop in a day or two.

Update: The iPhone code is now available at github.com/RHWorkshop/TIPIC-iPhone-Wyfly

The rig to make the video with.

Sunday, September 2, 2012

Thermal Imaging Phone Camera

http://www.instructables.com/id/Thermal-Imaging-Phone-Camera/

Thermal Imaging Phone Camera
I have a 100 year old house that can be drafty and hard to heat in the winter. I have been wanting a thermal imaging camera to help find leaks ever since we bought this house. So I finally just made my own.The temperature readings are overlaid onto the phone's camera display. The display is adjustable for different temperature ranges and can show the numeric reading for every zone or just 1.

No, it is not as nice as the $2000 - $10,000 cameras but it is good enough for most things you need a thermal imaging camera for and it is also rather fun to play with too.

I would like to make and sell these so others like me can save money and energy. I should be able to manufacture and sell them for around $150. The software for iPhones is ready, the Android software will be available soon. This is also going to be an Open Source Hardware project so if you want to make your own that is fine too.

Please watch my video entry to the Jack Daniel's Independence Project Contest and let me know if you like it.

Thursday, June 28, 2012

Laser Cut Universal Joint

I need a cheap universal joint for a project I am working on so I have been playing with a few options. This is the one that seems the best so far. It is using a plastic ball from a wall track toy which is pretty far from a perfect sphere but it seems to work very well anyway. For the project I will use a cheap 1/2" steel bearing and laser cut the pieces from Delrin which has low friction. I will probably use nylock nuts on the screws to be able to adjust how stiff the movement is.