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Bring on the Heat: Thermal Imaging with the NXT

Lookin' Hot!Having spent most of yesterday hacking and optimizing the firmware for the new Dexter Industries Thermal IR Sensor, I thought I would go ahead and make something fun with it today.

I built a pan and tilt rig for the sensor with a great deal of gearing down to allow me to take a lot of measurements as the rig moved around. Initially I had it set for about 40×40 measurements but those didn’t look that great and I wanted a bit more. I reprogrammed it and made it spit out data at a resolution of about 90×80.

The data from the thermal sensor was streamed to the debug output console in ROBOTC from which I copy and pasted it to an Excel worksheet.  I made some 3D graphs from the thermal data and it looked pretty cool.

Excel graph for cold glassExcel graph for candle flame

The left one is a cold glass and the right one is a candle.  I wasn’t really happy with the results of the graphs so I decided to quickly whip up a .Net app to read my CSV data and make some more traditional thermal images.  A few hours later, the results really did look very cool.

Thermal image for cold glassThermal image for candle flame

Again, the left one is the cold glass and the right one is the candle.  Now that you have a thermal image, you can see the heat from the candle a lot more clearly. I made a quick video of the whole rig so you can get an idea.

As you can see it moved quite slowly but steady wins the race!  I have no idea what I am going to do with it now, it was to try but perhaps someone else can try and make something even cooler with it!

The driver and program will be part of the next Driver Suite version. You can download a preliminary driver and this program from here: [LINK].  The .Net program and CSV files can be downloaded here: [LINK]. You will need Visual Studio to compile it.  You can download a free (Express) version of C# from the Microsoft website.

About Xander

Xander Soldaat is a Software Engineer and former Infrastructure Architect. He loves building and programming robots. He recently had the opportunity to turn his robotics hobby into his profession and has started working for Robomatter, the makers of ROBOTC and Robot Virtual Words.