Thermal camera for SMPS PCB checking.

[treez]

Hello
The internet is very slow today, I think its this global bug.
Does anyone know of a good , cheap Thermal Camera for looking at SMPS PCB’s? We don’t need all the special stuff like video camera overlay etc etc.
Don’t need a mobile spot etc
Just a decent picture screen size, (at least 4cm by 4cm) for our SMPS PCB which is 10cm by 15cm…(we don’t need to see all of it at once)

 

[FvM]

Did you look at FLIR TG130?

 

[mtwieg]

I have a Seek Thermal compact, which functions as a smartphone accessory. Very nice resolution, low price, though I can't speak to its absolute accuracy. Also easy to save images to the phone, which is nice. Unfortunately it can't coregister optical images with the phone's normal camera (at short distances, anyways).

The FLIR One has both optical and IR cameras built in so it can do coregistration, but the IR camera has much lower resolution (the blending of the two images will make the thermal images appear much sharper, but the actual thermal map is still low res).

 

[schmitt trigger]

Thanks for sharing those smartphone thermal cameras. Their price is just incredible!
In the early 2000s we had a Fluke unit at work, which had cost close to US$10,000................which now can be done by about US$500

To Treez question: get the highest resolution you can afford, to be able to accurately pinpoint the heat sources on your boards.