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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Is there something specific about the camera in the Iphone that would preclude doing a similar thing to android phones? Or is it just a matter of uniformity of the housing?

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That is probably precisely the reason why it's not available for Android, there are hundreds of different physical form factors and many more configurations.

Yeah, not so much the phone's camera as figuring out how to strap the thermal camera on and plug it in. It has its own internal battery as well, so it's not the smallest load.

It does not use the iPhone's camera, I think due to parallax problems. It has both an IR and visible light camera side by side. This means it can take both a thermal and visible image and overlay them, so you can compare or something.

Like this? http://therm-app.com/

$999 is a bit pricey I think.

You can buy a pro-sumer device for that money:

http://www.testequipmentdepot.com/flir/e-series/e4.htm

Well, the Opgal device has a resolution of 384 x 288 while the E4 lists 80x60. It's probably worth the asking price.

That's pretty nifty, and a much more elegant product design than FLIR's.

The E4 can be modified for 320x240 support (at least the older ones could, don't know if they've "fixed" this or not), but it sounds like Opgal's sensor is even better in that respect.

That's a good point. I wonder how much you could coax out of a regular camera by putting an IR pass filter in front of it to filter out all the other wavelengths and then using a long exposure.

That might be a dirt cheap way to get a passable IR cam.

You can see some IR sources like remote-control IR LEDs with a conventional CCD camera, but you'd do it by removing its existing IR filter rather than adding one. The IR cameras being discussed here respond to much longer wavelengths, though, and yield completely different results. The black-body spectrum for thermal IR has far too little energy at the frequencies that traditional CCD cameras are sensitive to.

I believe I read somewhere that they are working on Android versions.

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