starting off tonight with mount joy x which is an irish dry stout from stone angel brewing in
winnipeg they describe it as a traditional dark roasty and dry stout with notes of coffee and
chocolate very much in the irish style with no added flavorings the name seems to be a reference
to a traditional brewery from way back in history in ireland interesting so tonight i'm taking a bit
of a closer look at this thermal imager this unity uti 690a thermal imager that banggood sent me for
review or project feature or whatever you want to call this kind of a video you probably already
saw the unboxing on the mailbag video up there in the corner so i won't uh bore you with that part
let's just get right to it in the box we have the thermal imager itself we have a 16 gig sd card we
have a usbc charging lead and we have a manual in chinese and in english 25 pages in each language
um i'm not going to bother reading through all of the specs for a hobby unit like this one is
i'll just go through the very basic stuff uh it claims to have a temperature
range of minus 20 to plus 400 celsius although the accuracy spec is plus or minus two degrees celsius
or plus or minus two percent whichever is greater in the range between -10 and 400 it can do celsius
or fahrenheit and it has a bunch of different palette modes the display is 320 by 240 however
the sensor itself is 120x90 but the first order of business with anything with a screen on it
so this guy is a very entry-level thermal imager the one thing that they're doing to keep the cost
down is it's only a thermal camera it doesn't have a visible light camera in it so on the front here
we have the thermal sensor we have a little led and we have a laser yeah it's got a laser
so that basically allows you to do targeting where it's pointed at
on the back side here we have four buttons a power button an ok button and an up down selector a
quarter 20 thread on the bottom so you can put it on a tripod there's a trigger on the front
and up top here we have the usbc connection and we have a spot to plug in the micro sd card
which plugs in exactly as you would expect the micro sd card to plug in
and then there's a little flap on top to keep the gravel out i guess the unit claims an ip54 rating
and a two meter drop survivability for those not familiar ip54 translates to this the first digit
5 shows that it's dust protected ingress of dust is not entirely prevented but it must not enter
in sufficient quantity to interfere with the operation the second digit of the 54 being four
protected against splashing the enclosure from any direction shall not have a harmful effect
and there's all the specs and everything of what that test is so i have never had a thermal camera
before and this one is the least expensive one i could find on banggood when i uh when i was asking
them for it so is it any good for uh for a hobby shop without like uh yours and mine well maybe
probably let's find out it's kind of difficult to film a camera here film the screen of it here i'm
just going to take a picture of that and insert it in editing which you do by squeezing the trigger
and you saw the image flash for a second i'll do that one more time
you saw the little laser icon up on the top when you squeeze and hold the trigger and then when i
release it when i just do it quickly it saves so any of my sign back there it's showing right in
the center of the scrolling leds which is right where that crosshair is that crosshair there
that is what shows up in the top here and then on screen there's two other points it's showing the
coolest spot which right now is or 17 which is the tools that are behind the thing and then in
the middle there it is showing the hottest spot which is on that little red cross hairs there
except for it keeps bouncing around because it's always picking the hottest spot and that's 30.7
then there is the scale colors on the side for those who use colors to determine things okay so
let's just quickly go through the menus here the ok button takes you into the menu there's an image
view display and if you click on ok one more time it will show you the images that are on the sd
card there's a whole bunch of them that i've been playing with but there is the one that i just took
a second ago like i said i will i will have thrown it up on the screen already uh in editing and when
you're in the menus the power button is the back button uh screen display okay so you turn on the
center point cross hairs or turn them off they're on right now the high and low points which i was
pointing out earlier you can change the palette and change the date and time palette is at is the
uh little legend that goes up the side there let's turn it off quickly here
you see it's not there anymore on the side
if i turn it back on there you can see it there i suspect that's probably useful for for a lot of
people i'm not convinced with my colorblind eyes it gives me a lot of intelligence but
i'm a small minority of the population so your mileage may vary we have a high wall alert which
you can set up to alert you when the temperatures that it's sensing are above or below certain
thresholds with or without a buzzer that could be useful if you've uh got it sitting on a tripod and
stuff's uh happening in front of it that you want to keep track of there's the led light
you can see it's on now palette you can adjust the palette of colors available so there is what
rainbow hc high contrast looks like that's the one that i have been using because it works best
for my eyes lava rainbow which is the default that it comes with out of the box iron okay
white hot black hot and then back to rainbow high contrast which as i said is the one that i prefer
and then there is the general settings menu where you can set the language options are
english or chinese and set the temperature units celsius of fahrenheit of course emissivity
that is a little bit tricky for me to explain basically different materials different
surfaces of materials emit infrared i.e temperature in different ways so that allows you
to calibrate and compensate for it you turn the laser on or off right now i've got it turned on
just to help with targeting set the time and date screen brightness and the auto power off it can
auto power off in 5 minutes up to 30 minutes or you can disable that
auto save and that saves to the sd card every time you click the trigger you format the sd
card check the device info this particular one has firmware
3.7 and then the sd card capacity and the model is as we said off the top uti690a
so i guess you should look at a few things
there is my beer glass which is showing a nice comfortable 9.7 celsius at the lowest
i like that let's try this in a more in a practical application something that you might
actually use it for in your hobby shop those of you who have been around for a while may recognize
this is the lm317 kit that a bunch of us did uh speed races uh speed kit builds on a while back
all uh quickly into a playlist of people that were that were involved in that that was kind of fun
but it is a linear regulator power supply takes ac in uh bridge diode or bridge rectifier
um series uh analog regulator and then i've just got an 8 ohm load on there
just to give it something to work against and create a bit of heat so we turn that on
yet the led came on and take a look at things here starting temperature just at this little voltage
of the resistor is about 16.2 uh you'll notice that it goes into self-calibration basically
when whatever it's measuring is outside the range that's showing it recalibrates
and sets new high and low on that bar on the side there uh here we're getting some heat
can you see that so the regulator looks like it's about 42 and a half or thereabouts
part of that is because this thing's putting out 14 volts ac out of the transformer i've got this
turned fairly low so a lot of that is being dumped across there if we crank it up crank
the voltage up we should notice that resistor starts getting toasty oh yeah look at that
there we go and it should recalibrate pretty soon as the temperature gets stupid
yeah but the important part i mean you know the load is going to get hot the important part though
is looking at the circuit we expect the heat sink on that regulator to get hot but oh what's going
on over here that full bridge rectifier those diodes are getting stinking hot 130
140 so that is where this thing could probably come in really handy on a hobbyist's bench
just doing a quick shot of a circuit board to find where the hot spot is if something's not working
properly if you're you're drawing excessive current like i was because i'm drawing far
too much current for those little diodes there so let's just go and take a quick peek at this
thing on the website and uh gather a bit more information about it and i'll come back and
draw some conclusions so here it is on banggood's website as i record this it's selling for 173.99
american when it's not on sale it's 219.99 and this is the lowest price thermal imager thermal
camera that i have been able to find anywhere and that's why i asked banggood to send it to me
i probably could have convinced them to send me something more expensive but i want to stick
to stuff that a normal hobbyist could reasonably afford if it was something that you wanted to get
to get your hands on yeah you can see they've even got a few other more expensive thermal imagers
that they sell and unity has a whole bunch that are much more expensive as well here is the
full set of specs that are in the manual so you can read that there if you choose to
oh yeah they talk about analyzing software and there is some software available for it
for windows only which is why i'm not showing it to you there it is there you can download it from
a link on the banggood page if you want to take a look at it anyway as i said i unfortunately can't
show that to you because it's windows software and i am a fully linux house here it's not on the web
page but i i found it in the manual the battery is lithium ion 18650 2600 milliamp hour it says it
can run continuously for nine hours and as it says here the full recharge time right from dead is
about is less than two and a half hours so when i was researching i found a fairly lengthy thread on
the eev blog forum about this very temperature uh image or thermal imager it looks like they first
spotted it uh late 2021 on banggood and i'll put a link to this if you want to learn more about
it they've got a whole bunch of information on it including similar models and whatnot from unity a
couple of them did reviews in it as well but this is all the same information again so i'll just
leave a link for this if you want to look at it so there's just a quick look at this unity uti 6908
thermal imager handheld thermal camera i think it's going to come in pretty handy around here
i'm not going to do a teardown today mostly because what i found from the eev blog guys there
are six screws holding it together there's two under that little piece of plastic there there's
two under there and there's two buried behind the screen so you have to remove this entire adhesive
bezel and i don't want to do that because i want to actually use this thing that's why i asked
banggood to send it to me in the first place you may recall from what i mentioned in the mailbag
that i am trying to get these sponsors to stock my shop up with every tool i've ever wanted but
couldn't afford so i'm not going to trash this one just to see what's inside it but anyway uh
i think that's uh that just goes over it quickly and for the uses that i had in mind for it i
think it's going to come in real handy i'm not going to use it necessarily for raw measurements
although it does do that i think i'm mostly just going to use it to try and find
hot spots or cold spots in things that shouldn't have them to quickly identify them and quickly
notice them changing anyway if you have any questions or comments about this of course you
can put them down below if you have any experience with this model or much more expensive models
also chime in and be interesting to hear what uh what other people have to say as i said at
the beginning this is the only one that i've ever dealt with so it's hard for me to compare
it to other things but it should do what i want anyway thanks for watching i'll talk to you later