Unfortunately, I have run into a fairly serious issue with this project. The problem is that the thermopile that I am using (MLX 90620) has a wide field of view, 60 degrees. This means that when I pan and tilt the thermopile and take successive scans, each scan area overlaps the previous one, resulting in an unusual image.<\/p>\n
I have tried several ideas to resolve this, but it does not seem to be possible. I could, in theory, modify the pan and tilt distance between each scan in order to prevent overlap, but in order to do this I would need to know the exact distance from the thermopile to the target (since the diameter of the Field of View cone will increase with distance). Since I don’t have this information, I can’t do this. Even if I did have the distance info, with such a wide FOV, the image resolution would be very poor at even a short distance from the thermal sensor.<\/p>\n
The only thing to do here would be to use some form of lens to focus the FOV cone to a column. I tried a fresnel lens that I had lying around, but this had no effect. I don’t know if you can collimate a thermal sensor like you would an optical device.<\/p>\n
I may have to search for a different thermal sensor with a narrow FOV, or possible use a single thermal sensor. A single sensor would be incredibly slow to scan, but it would not have any FOV issues. I could also try buying several single-pixel thermal sensors and making a thermopile myself, although calibrating it perfectly may be difficult.<\/p>\n
While thinking about my changes to the project, I also thought about other improvements. For example, I could include UV sensors (or just UV led’s which can also be used as sensors) to pick up UV light, I could also have uv emitters to turn my scanner into a black light. <\/p>\n
I could incorporate conventional infrared diodes as well, and a simple camera sensitive to IR, so I could pick up Visible light, Near IR, Far IR, (thermal) and UV. <\/p>\n
If I was even more ambitious, I could include a directional radio receiver with a very wide frequency range. This would give me the ability to detect radio signals, which I could then plot on the scanners screen, giving the user the ability to “see” radio waves, essentially. <\/p>\n
The idea would be to make up for the disasappointly low resolution of the thermal image with the ability to see further into the Electromagnetic spectrum.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Unfortunately, I have run into a fairly serious issue with this project. The problem is that the thermopile that I am using (MLX 90620) has a wide field of view, 60 degrees. This means that when I pan and tilt the thermopile and take successive scans, each scan area overlaps the previous one, resulting in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-inventions","has-post-title","has-post-date","has-post-category","has-post-tag","has-post-comment","has-post-author",""],"aioseo_notices":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/phoenixgamedevelopment.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/phoenixgamedevelopment.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/phoenixgamedevelopment.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phoenixgamedevelopment.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phoenixgamedevelopment.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=494"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/phoenixgamedevelopment.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":521,"href":"https:\/\/phoenixgamedevelopment.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494\/revisions\/521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/phoenixgamedevelopment.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phoenixgamedevelopment.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phoenixgamedevelopment.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}