Why we need one?

Good question. Yes, we can use thermocouples, which are abundant, cheap, and even more accurate. However, a thermal camera takes your thermocouples, multiplies them by tens of thousands, and can measure from a distance!

In electrical, I envision this being used for:

• Electrical board thermal testing (+ identifying any hotspots from components, traces, etc.)—I see this being relevant to:
  • BMS
  • MPPT
  • Buck converter
• Non-contact temperature measurement (may be relevant for limiting contamination to components or if components are too fragile/small/clean to tape a thermocouple to)
• High temperatures—during hot air rework or soldering possibly, where a thermocouple is not viable to attach/use
• (not recommended but possible) Identifying shorts in a circuit by checking thermals
  • Example

Also, I don’t know much about thermals and structures, but they may also find it useful for checking heat flow and gradients in heatsinks, radiators, etc.

What are the options?

There are very few options that are reasonably priced (I’ve arbitrarily defined as <$1K CAD). Based on preliminary searching, here’s a few (also Vevor credit Reid):

So, what’s the verdict?

Vevor SC240M

It ****absolutely blows all other options out of the water in terms of cost to performance. Downsides I can see is of course a lesser known brand and with that, questionable support and not many people have used it. Also, potentially false specs, but we can easily test that.

However, it has 10x the pixels for 2/3 the cost compared to the FLIR in same form factor, so there’s really no contest.