➡ Today, we’re looking at a budget-friendly thermal imager for cars. Despite some connection issues, the device offers decent resolution and can detect living things up to 300 meters away. It’s small and easy to install, but the screen might be too tiny for some. The device uses AI to distinguish between cars and living things, but it needs to be at least 40 meters ahead to work effectively.
➡ This article discusses a thermal imager that can be used for night driving and security purposes. The device, priced at $400, can detect living beings up to 100 meters away and is designed to be weatherproof. However, the small screen size and narrow field of view may limit its effectiveness for driving. Despite this, it could be useful for home surveillance or for those living in vehicles or remote areas.
➡ The text simply says “safe.”

Okay, today on the channel, we’re reviewing another low-budget, surprisingly high-performing thermal imager for your car. I’ve reviewed all kinds of thermal imagers from EDC-sized thermal imagers. Ones that fit in your pocket. I’ve also reviewed ones that you put on drones, hand-held camcorder style, ones that you mount on rifles. I’ve had some fairly good experience dealing with thermal imagers before, so I know what’s good and what’s garbage, but I’m not an expert per se. Now, this is a budget option thermal imager with decent resolution for your car. I regret not getting the one that had the bigger screen and more features, because this one’s really too small for my old eyes.

So usually, with these thermal imagers from Thermal Master, you simply plug it into your phone and there you have it. A thermal image. But this one, for some reason, is not allowing me to connect, no matter what I do. Waiting for connection. Okay, let’s plug it in. Let’s see what happens. Anything? No? Oven? In theory, you should be able to connect this to an iPad. Okay, so I got a tablet here. If this works, I’m going to be very excited. Plug in device. Device is plugged in. Nothing is happening. Damn. Scan code. Is there a code for me to scan? Like, what the…

Oh, there’s a code. But it’s f***ing tiny. Connection failed. See if I can scan this bit. Connection. It just immediately doesn’t even try it for two seconds. No. Watch how fast it rejects me. Look how fast. I haven’t been rejected this fast since high school. It claims that it will automatically link up if you make your Wi-Fi hotspot available, which I’m not sure how I feel about that. For whatever reason, this one does not want to connect, but usually it connects. So I guess it’s a done. Fortunately, I have no affiliation with this company.

I bought this with my own money, because I wanted to see whether it was good or not, and what are some of the advantages are. Now, this has a 256 by 192 sensor. It claims that it can amplify that using its fancy AI algorithm to about double that amount. 512 over 3. What would that be? 392, I believe, or something to that effect. It claims that it has 300 meter life detect. Life detects, so it can detect things that are alive, apparently. Now, it does talk. That’s the one thing it does very well. Let’s listen to it talk real quick here.

It detects that the communist cameraman is a hazard. So in that respect, it’s very accurate and performs well. It keeps detecting that hazard. Okay, shut up now. Zero freeze for safety. Whatever that means. It will not freeze. Actually, it’s shutterless. That basically means that you’re going to get nice, smooth, kind of continuous output. Some of these thermal images sometimes they can get stuck on a frame, and it can be really annoying, you know, if you’re trying to detect something moving. All condition, IP69K. So that is basically ingress protection of the highest order. So it claims because, of course, one of these things is going to go on the car.

And this is going to go in the car. Okay, so here’s the device. I’ve just did a quick install because I’m not really ready to commit to this just yet. It’s a small screen, and I want to see how it performs before I adhere it to the vehicle. I did use the magnet, which actually works quite well on its own up top. At least it does so far. For all I know, we could be dragging it down the street in a few minutes here if it blows off. So I haven’t hardwired it to the car or anything like that.

As you can see, the cord is just running down here alongside the window. And there it is. And it’s pretty easy plug and play. The problem is, is that it’s such a tiny screen that I could see somebody in the middle of the night trying to look to see if there’s a deer crossing the road. And because they’re not paying attention to the road, they end up hitting a deer. But it seems to be working fine. We got a good frame rate, very responsive. So oftentimes these thermal imagers will be kind of glitchy and there’s lag.

Well, that truck up there is probably, I don’t know, I’d say maybe 150 meters. And you could see it. It’s identified it on there. But if there was a couple seconds of lag, that two seconds could make a big difference to see whether or not animals are jumping out. Now, there is a annoying voice lady. We’ll turn her on and we’ll see what she detects. So it uses AI to distinguish between cars and living things. Warning too close, it said. OK, let’s see what else this thing has to say. I could see this getting annoying real fast.

There’s another model you can get that has a bigger screen. Honestly, I would probably want that over this. The only reason why I got this one is because it was the only one that was available and it’s less than half the price. So you could see that the living things stand out really well, but I don’t hear any hazards. It seems to care that I’m a tailgater, but it doesn’t seem to care that this guy is going to get destroyed right now. Do you not care about life? It’s yet to say hazard for any human.

I think this thing was built by Skynet. Do you care about this old man’s life? Oh, he’s like, get your ass over there, sonny boy. He’s like, don’t give me the thumbs up, you son of a bitch. Yeah, so the hazard really has to be far out. So we’re going to do a little to find an open space here to see. So let’s see if it sees this guy. So it can’t even see that guy and he was, you know. So really, you got to be 40 meters ahead for this thing to work. Mind you, it’s not perfectly centered right now.

It’s slightly off to this side. Let’s see if it detects this one up here. Okay, so it did have a ding. It dinged. So it does care about this person. She must be carrying a computer. Oh, ding again. Another person. Okay. All right. We’re up in our batting average here. Let’s see if it gets this one here. Human detected. That guy’s a hazard. I could tell by those sunglasses it detects the creepers. Oh, there’s another one. Oh, this guy’s a warning. It’s too bad you couldn’t program it to say certain things. Jay Walker. Must be eradicated.

This guy. It didn’t even do anything. It doesn’t care about you, bro. Look, he’s mad at me. He’s mad at me. Bro, it wasn’t me. It was the machine. Contrary to popular belief, in the apocalypse, most people aren’t going to die by the hands of marauders. In fact, you’re probably going to die from disease. This is why you need antibiotics. The problem is getting them requires a prescription. Well, today’s sponsor is Jace Medical. They’ve created a revolutionary service that allows you to get prescription medications like antibiotics with relative ease hassle-free. This will be worth more than gold in an emergency for somebody who needs them.

So do yourself a favor and take your prepping to the next level while you still can. Check out the link in the description below. And now, back to the video. So because I have this roof rack on my truck, there’s only so much space for me to put the sensor in front of it. And it’s kind of overlapping the window a bit. And so when I use my wipers, it’s hitting it. I’m starting to get too many computers here. So I got my main screen. I got my thermal. I got my ice camera, just in case I got to show my papers.

Then I got my dash cam, which is not plugged in right now. I have my radar detector and CB radio. It would be nice to have it all on one screen, you know? There’s an idea. So far, I’m impressed with this thing. I think I’m going to see if I can get the one with the bigger screen sent to me. Because that’s pretty neat, man. It’s using the white-black palette, but it shows the really hot parts in like a yellowy orange. So I like that. And it’s actually not in my line of sight, because you guys can’t see it from my angle.

But this thing is not impeding my line of sight at all, as much as this is. If you get tired of it, you can just go like that, and it’ll shut off. And then you can just do that towards back on. I don’t see why they can’t make a pan-tilled zoom option. It would be nice if there was like just a little joystick, and you could, you know, move it around a little bit if you wanted to. Okay, so we’ve been driving around for about an hour and change. And we’ve been driving around.

It’s really muddy. There’s all kinds of splatter. We drove down the highway, so cars are kicking up debris. And we still have a very good, clear view of what’s going on. The sensor hasn’t been impeded at all. I mean, it’s slightly blurry, I guess, but it’s still pretty decent. So that’s it. I mean, it’s pretty inconspicuous, especially with the roof rack. You don’t really notice at first. It’d be cool, though, if you could actually embed it right in the grill, but then you might run into like heating issues and stuff. So I think it’s good where it is because, you know, the closer you get to here, the narrower your field of view.

With these thermals, it’s very hard for them to do a wide angle because it’s just too much information, too much data. All of the thermal imagers that we’ve talked about, with the exception of the one that’s mounted on the drone, you have to have it, you know, like right on your person and holding it up to you. But what if you want something that is away from you, but you want to view remotely? Well, that’s where this comes in. If you do a lot of highway driving, the thinking is, is that this will be able to detect a deer or any life form that’s on the side of the road out to around 300 meters.

Now, realistically, that’s being very generous. I would say at 100 meters, you’ll probably be able to detect that there’s some living orb out there. That’s what it’s going to appear like. And then as you get closer to it, you’re going to be able to detect what it actually is. But that could be potentially quite useful for people. The applications for this, for preppers then, go beyond mere driving at night. So let’s say you’re somebody who camps in your vehicle a lot or you maybe sleep in an RV and you just want to know if something is outside in the dark without having to use your flashlight or call attention to yourself.

Well, this will allow you to do that. There’s no infrared, so it can’t be detected by somebody else. I mean, if you were very clever, you could probably devise some kind of swivel or rotating system so that you could point it in different directions if you wanted to. You could put it on the roof of your car. For its affordability, this costs $400 USD, which is quite cheap for a thermal imager with all of these components. This right here costs around 300 bucks, and it’s just a little tiny thermal imager, and it leverages the technology in your phone.

But this is kind of a neat idea. It claims that it can also see through fog. All right, so there’s a train. You can see it’s very foggy out, and I just cleaned off the lens. For some reason, the defogger wasn’t working, so now it’s kind of working. It’s not working that great. What happened was the sensor was icing up for some reason, so there wasn’t enough heat that the sensor was giving off in order to melt the ice, so it was frozen, and so that obscured the lens, so this was all blurry.

Now it seems to be okay, and actually what was happening was that because there is a bit of defogger but it’s not warm enough, it is causing, I don’t know, it’s like causing it to ice up or something, so it’s kind of weird. On the topic of ingress protection, because I was very concerned about it, because when you look at it, there are these grills that obviously rain, snow, dust, and stuff can get into. This is the sensor that you’re worried about, and that is fully encased in something that is IPX 6, which is pretty much as good as it gets in terms of ingress protection falling short of being submersible.

So this is it. It’s a bigger sensor than this one, so you’re getting a decent-sized sensor for your fog. I don’t know if the sensor is smaller and this is just protective. There is a defogging feature built into here, so it will naturally defog, and I think that’s just the consequence of the heat that’s being created, so if you are going into a rainstorm or something, this will naturally dry itself off and kind of clean itself off. There’s a weatherproof gasket here that connects it to not only the power supply but also the monitor.

Apparently, this 3M tape is very adhesive. A little leery about attaching that to my truck’s paint job. So it does have this speaker on here to alert you of hazards, but as you can see, the speaker is nearly the same size as the screen. The one thing I like about this is that, you know, you get a lot of cord, right? If you were to connect this to, like, an RV or something like that, you could have this little thing on pretty much all the time plugged in to a 12-volt socket.

As you can see, I’m powering it right now with this blue heady. I do not think it can power over USB, but let’s try it out. Let’s see what happens here. What happens if I disconnect this? Nope. It can certainly not. I would say for the price for any thermal imager that is this good, that’s not a bad deal. If you pay a lot more, you can get different systems by FLIR. They are PTZ, so pan-tilt zoom, and they allow you to kind of look anywhere you want in 360 degrees.

You can control it from inside your house. For something like that, you’re talking $5,000, $10,000. They can go up to $30,000 if you want the super high-res long-range zoom versions. But, I mean, if you just have a driveway that you want to, you know, make sure nobody creeps up at night, there’s plenty of different ways to hook this up to your car. They don’t give you a fuse box connector, so you’re basically going to have to use your AC adapter until you find an alternative way to connect it.

So I’ve put around six hours of nighttime driving on this device, and I’ll tell you what I honestly think about it. In terms of the fog, had it not been below freezing, it would have worked perfectly in the fog. But because it was below freezing, the fog was icing up on the sensor. So it works fine in fog in any condition where it’s not below zero degrees Celsius. In terms of using it at night, it does work. And honestly, I can even drive the car just by simply looking at the screen on the thermal imager.

Now, I would not recommend doing that. Definitely don’t do that. However, there’s two main problems. One, I can confirm that the screen is just too small. You’re going to want a bigger screen. Number two, that wide angle, it needs to be a few degrees wider. Well, it still works further out, and this might be a little bit better on a bigger screen, possibly. If you have really good vision and you don’t have problems seeing tiny things, then you’ll probably be able to visually detect hazards on the little screen that’s provided.

But if you don’t have really good eyesight, then you’re going to have problems with this little screen. I can recommend this product only for security purposes, but not necessarily as a driving aid. That said, it doesn’t hurt to have it there. It’s like an accessory, but it’s certainly not necessary, and I really don’t know how useful it is. I know that’s kind of crazy to say, but I think it does augment your driving experience at night a little bit. It certainly would a lot more if that screen was bigger, so if you can, definitely get the larger, newer version of it.

I would recommend it for security if you have an RV or if you live out of your car, even if you have a tiny home or a place in the country and you want thermal optics outside to kind of act like a ring camera or a surveillance camera, and you want kind of a… I hate to say poor man’s because it’s still $500, but it’s as cheap as a remote thermal imager is going to get. So as a remote thermal imager just for stationary use for home surveillance, it actually works pretty good.

You could put this wherever you spend most of the time in your home, which for most of us, let’s face it, it’s in front of our PCs. Put this by your PC, and then you have a thermal imager readout of a point of interest on your property outside, and you can just swing this through the window or what have you. So yeah, there’s a lot of utility to this. I just don’t know if driving is this particular model’s claim to fame. So if you do a lot of night driving, it doesn’t hurt to have one of these, maybe not this particular model, but for most other applications, prepping related, I would actually recommend something like this.

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