Adding thermal imaging to your car is a lot easier than you might think... think car stereo plus some light fabrication. Seeing further in the dark? That's priceles
Would you like to see well beyond your high beams at night? Or see thru dust and light fog when you're behind the wheel and there's no where to pull off? We found an easy way to do it: FLIR's PathfindIR.
The PathfindIR is a thermal imager; that means it senses heat, the infrared energy radiated by the objects in front of its lens, and converts it into a visible image you can see.
It really does work in total darkness: hot objects, such as pedestrians and deer grow bright white, colder objects like clouds or concrete embankments grow a lighter grey. Cold objects, say, a can of coke? They look black on the monitor.
The end result is an image of what's coming up 3 to 5x past your high beams, according to FLIR. We found it easy to scan mounted up by our rear view mirror. Just watch for the bright flashes (and the dark ones) in the drive path.
Is a PathfindIR cheap? No.
But we found it fairly painless to install, since any monitor that can accept an regular old NTSCcomposite video signal can display video from the PathfindIR. (PAL models are also available.)
OK, we did mount it on a light bar on the front of the test truck rather than (a more typical) behind the grill mount that would require taking a hole saw to the grill and bolting it to a radiator mount... that certainly cut down on intallation pain!
Tons of video of the PathfindIR in action in the video!
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Posted by ArmpitOfDeath on 05/21/2008 at 11:25:16 am in Systm
I thought the same actually - would be a cool episode ... but apart from speed, what information would you want a HUD to display?
The IR of course! :p
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Posted by tokenuser on 05/21/2008 at 09:03:35 am in Systm
"I thought the same actually - would be a cool episode ... but apart from speed, what information would you want a HUD to display?
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Posted by ArmpitOfDeath on 05/21/2008 at 08:47:03 am in Systm
What I'd like to see is a followup episode - windscreen HUD.
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Posted by pcguy on 05/17/2008 at 10:14:36 am in Systm
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I agree other episode's ads seem to be a lot more tolerable than this episode's ads. This one seemed more like TV in that there seemed to be more ads than content.
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Posted by ptrussell on 05/14/2008 at 02:51:58 pm in Systm
I like the episode as the topic hits close to home. I dont like to drive at night as it gets hard to see being dazzled by headlights and the loss of contrast.
On a future episode of Systm or Tekzilla I would like to have a comparison of
vision enhancement systems. I believe Lexus and some other car companies has built their own systems. There are other companies with IR cameras but they may go more for military jobs.
These are government paid ads so I dont think they can edit them short or change the format. I hope they pay well. I would like the ads more if they were tailored to my taste and especially if they are useful. I like Go Daddy but I am not building a website. If Amazon had an ad with a discount code that would be cool.
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Posted by edwinm on 05/14/2008 at 04:42:31 am in Systm
I don't post here very often, but the length and number of ads on this particular episode is enough to prompt a response. I understand that there are bills to pay, but the ratio of ad time to content time seemed awfully high. I also realize that there isn't always going to be enough to fill thirty minutes every week because each episode of Systm tends to cover only one topic in depth, unlike Tekzilla which has several segments to fill the time. At least it is better than it was before Patrick when we would go for months without an episode, but still the time spent on ads should be a certain percentage of show length and that percentage should be significantly less that it was on this episode.
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Posted by speed on 05/14/2008 at 12:10:49 am in Systm
There's paying the bills and then there's just being greedy. I accept the number of ads in Tekzilla, and accept sponsors on Diggnation and TRS because I realize they have bills to pay. However, 1/4 of the show shouldn't be ads, that's just too far. Like I said before, if I wanted all those ads, I'd go back to regular TV and get rid of my PVR.
All I ask is that the number of ads be scaled to the shows length. Even if Patrick can't do a full 30 min Systm every week, don't insult me like that (especially when the episode itself was a giant ad).
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Posted by Mr. Underachiever on 05/13/2008 at 10:08:45 pm in Systm
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I don't think that's fair at all. Not every topic they cover is going to fill 30 minutes. That's the whole beauty of IPTV--it doesn't have to. And just because they had a lot of ads (which DID get annoying) doesn't mean they're consumed by greed. It's called paying the bills, so that they can make longer, better episodes.
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Posted by Garphunkel on 05/13/2008 at 09:38:41 pm in Systm
Yeah, I liked the topic, but too many commercials...2 minutes 15 seconds of ads, compared to 6minutes 10 seconds of actual showtime. Wow.
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Posted by perilousone on 05/13/2008 at 07:03:29 pm in Systm
Man... I hadn't watched Systm in a long time. Now I kind of regret it. I was moved to come and post about all the Ads and how quickly they came. Lo and behold, I'm not the only one who didn't like it.
Come on! This is version 3 ;), not 1, not 2. Be different.
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