Measure. Analyze. Learn.
This is the Vernier Infrared Thermometer.
And, what it does is, it measures the
temperature of objects without having to touch them.
And, it measures the infrared radiation coming from the object.
And, it comes into this part of the detector here.
It measures the temperature.
So, it's nice to be able to things like,
measure temperatures in the environment.
You want to compare concrete, asphalt, and
grass that's out in the sunshine,
the surface temperature of different cars and the color.
I'm going to use it to measure the temperature of this skillet.
So, I don't actually have to touch it there.
I might measure the palm of my hand to the back of my hand.
So, it's a nice way to be able to measure temperatures
without actually having to be in physical contact with it.
So, to turn the device on, this is the on/off button,
where it says MEASure, and you actually turn that on.
And, at this point we see a temperature that's coming up here.
And, if I hold my hand, maybe, in front of it like that,
I get one temperature, flip it over,
maybe the back of my hand is a little colder there.
Now, there's also a couple of other buttons here.
And, this one right here, where it says 'Hold'.
What this will do is, if you press it,
it will hold whatever the last temperature was on there.
So, the idea here is, that you could aim it at something,
just press hold, it would give you that value,
you could write it down, so it's not changing on you.
So, if you're using it as a stand alone device,
you might choose to use that.
Now, the other button here is a laser button.
And what this does, is it turns on the laser,
and the laser gives you a circle.
So, if I turn it on here, we can actually, I will turn it toward the,
here you can see there's lasers coming out of there.
And so, it turns it on and we can have a circle that's on my hand.
It's measuring the temperature inside the circle there.
So, whatever radiation is coming from
that area inside the circle is what it's measuring.
So, if I move further out, the circle gets bigger;
if I get closer the circle gets smaller.
A common question I will get with this one is,
"How far away can the object be?"
Well, it can be very very far away, but what it's doing is,
it's looking at radiation coming from the
solid angle from the object.
So, it could be wall that's very distant,
but it's going to be the large area of that wall.
If you're close to the wall,
it's just going to be a little piece of the wall.
So, you know, I turned it on, so pretty obviously,
that it must have some battery inside.
And, it turns out that it does,
it's back here, behind this panel here,
it's just some AAA batteries.
So, I'd like to set this up to make
some measurements here, with my skillet.
So, I just have my skillet on the hotplate.
And, we'll turn it on, and measure the temperature
going up, and then maybe watch it go back down again.
So, at this point, I need to attach this to the cable.
And so, this is the infrared thermometer cable.
And, it just plugs in via the phono plug here at the back.
And, I'm going to plug it into my LabQuest here.
And now, we get our reading here on the device, on our meter.
Now let’s take a look at our upper right corner here.
It's a similar default mode to most of the temperature sensors;
being time based; and three minutes, 180 seconds;
this one defaults to one sample per second for that.
Now, that's good for some things, what I would like to do is:
lengthen my time a little bit,
I'd like to do maybe for about five minutes;
And so, I'm going to go up here, and press that there,
and then, I want to change this to 5 minutes, or 300 seconds,
so I'll tap on '180', make this '300', say 'Done',
and now, I'm fine with that, I'm going to say 'OK'.
And now, we are ready to collect data.
And, I will turn the hotplate on, and we'll measure
the temperature of the inside of the skillet here
as it collects data.
So, I'm going to go ahead and start with this.
I will turn on my laser.
And so, we can see the laser circle, down in there.
And then, I will hit the collect button.
And, it starts to collet data.
Let it start running there for a second.
And then, I will turn this on.
And now, it is on, and we'll let it collect data for five minutes.
So, I've let about half of my time elapse here.
So, at this point, I'm going turn it off.
And, we'll watch the cooling of the skillet.
Now, our data collection is complete.
Turn off my laser.
And, we've got our data.
And, if we look at it here, we see the temperature
begins to rise up here.
And, at this point right here, there's a little blip in the data,
and that's when I turned the actual hotplate off,
and I moved my temperature sensor as I did that.
So, it, kind of, got off the spot, but it's ok,
because that may have happened.
And, it's interesting to note, that the temperature actually
keeps rising a little bit, even after I turn the hotplate off.
And so, but then it begins to cool off again.
So, you know, for this one, the analysis,
I might be interested in what was the maximum temperature.
So, I could go to 'Statistics', check the box next to 'Temperature'.
And, I ended up with the maximum of
172.7 degrees C at 183 seconds.
So that might be some of the analysis that I would do with this.
The Vernier Infrared Thermometer allows you to measure
temperatures without having to touch the object.
So, for environmental studies, monitoring temperature of
the environment of different surfaces. It's great for that.
We saw it here with the skillet,
being able to measure something without having to touch it.
And so, that's the real advantage of this.
So, there's lots of uses for it, in a lot of different areas.
And, we'd love to see what you can do with it.