Industrial-strength Android
With many phone markets tipping saturation point, Android is moving into industry. Darren Yates reveals some of the unlikely places you’ll find Google’s mobile OS.
At the end of 2015, market analysts Telsyte estimated the number of Australians owning at least one smartphone at some 17.6 million ( tinyurl.com/ apc437-telsyte) — that’s nudging somewhere near 75% of us. It’s the same for much of the Western world, resulting in most phone makers eyeing off emerging markets such as China and India to find continued growth. We’ve long supported the idea that smartphones are genuine ‘personal computers’, with processing performance fast approaching that of laptops. Those capabilities, combined with Android’s increasing maturity, are seeing the mobile OS finding homes in a new range of industrial applications.
THERMAL IMAGING CAMERAS
One of the hottest handheld tools to hit the market in the last five years has been thermal imaging cameras (TICs). You’ve probably already seen professional versions of these cameras in action during televised cricket coverage as ‘Hot Spot’. Handheld thermal cameras won’t likely save your next innings in backyard cricket, but they’re increasingly being used as a first-line diagnostic tool in many industries. They typically combine a visible-spectrum camera with what’s known as an ‘infrared thermopile sensor’, a series of infrared sensors coupled into a two-dimensional array similar to a standard camera imaging sensor you’ll find in your smartphone. Together, they create a coloured heat map of whatever you point the camera at, allowing you to pin-point sources of heat, which makes it a valuable tool, particularly in mechanical and industrial applications (not to mention reviewing smartphones and laptops).
It’s reported the Nine Network paid as much as $10,000 a day just to hire the four ‘hot spot’ cameras used in its cricket coverage before 2013, so this technology certainly isn’t ‘low-cost’. But thankfully, those costs are far less if you don’t need TV frame-rate speed or resolution.
Manufacturer FLIR makes one of the cheapest TICs available as a plug-in module designed for smartphones ( www.flir.com/flirone/android). The FLIR ONE plugs into Android devices equipped with a USB-OTG port and minimum Android 4.4.2/KitKat OS. You’ll find it on the street for around US$250. While the FLIR ONE has a thermal imaging resolution of 80 x 60 pixels, competitor Seek Thermal teamed up with US industrial giant Raytheon to make a similar plug-in module with an improved 206 x 156-pixel thermal resolution for around the same price. The Seek Thermal Compact also connects via USB-OTG on supported devices with Android 4.3/Jelly Bean or later ( www.thermal.com/products/compact).
The overall thermal resolution of these devices might seem pretty low, but even the majority of industrialgrade TICs don’t have thermal resolution beyond VGA (640 x 480p). The top of the tree right now looks to be the new FLIR T1K camera — with 1,024 x 768-pixel native thermal resolution and accurate to 0.02 degrees at 30°C, it’s selling for around the $41,000 mark — and that’s US dollars ( tinyurl.com/ apc437-flir).