RE: Re: Omega Race repair

> I'll bet one of those infra-red temperature pointer
> thingies would work well in spotting parts that are
> overheating. You know, after you've burned away the
> nerve endings on your 10th finger...

Those do kinda work-- the spot size is a little hard to manage at close
range (they're meant more for reading the temperature on an air vent in the
ceiling from 20' away than reading the temperature on a chip from half an
inch though).

I actually did sort of a poor-man's thermal imager by putting a PCB on the
XY gantry of a CNC mill and putting the thermometer on the Z axis. Step the
x/y, read the thermometer, fill in excel cells with the values and use
conditional formatting. That limited it to just a few color levels, but I
suppose a visual basic app would probably work better. ;-)

One 'gotcha' with the handheld IR units is that they're easily confused by
emissivity of the object. (Sort of the "shiny-ness" of it.) A shiny
sticker on a chip can have a radically different 'temperature' vs. the chip
itself because of the different amounts of light reflecting off of it.

On the "right way" to do it:

http://www.nationalinfrared.com/RAZ_IR_Infrared_Camera.php

Is about the cheapest one I've found ($10K). They've gone down in price--
last year the "cheap" ones were closer to $15K. I spent a long time trying
to justify buying one (figured I could 'rent' time on it to the local
engineering types) but there just wasn't going to be much return on it
anytime soon so I keep waiting for the price to drop. ;-)

-Clay

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Received on Thu Oct 12 11:08:41 2006