The FLIR Vue PRO. Real Infrared for FPV market

Yup! Real life FLIR just like the Military and Cops use except made small and simple for "Drone" use.

Thanks to my buddy PDXDave, as he is lovingly called in the FPV community, who works for FLIR (yes, that is the name of the company and not the technology) in the Portland Oregon area; I was able to become a beta tester for FLIR's new "hobby grade"(for lack of a better word) FLIR cam. It is actually a camera based on their TAU camera but stripped of unusable features to the hobbyist and pro-sumer and a recorder and Bluetooth added. The built in recorder is simple and uses a standard micro SD card and one button control on the side of the camera. With the addition of the Bluetooth now the camera can be interfaced with a device like a tablet or cell phone and camera features turned on or off through a control app. You can even start or stop the recording through the app. Another great feature added is the PWM controls. With my transmitter I can change color pallets (like white-hot to black-hot for example among others) start/stop recording, take still pictures along with other features. 

Is it easy to set up? YES! The camera its self is pretty much plug and play! The only set up I really had to do as far as the camera goes was to attach it to my Team Black Sheep Discovery, map the PWM controls on my TX and flyyyyy. While the image of the FLIR VUE Pro is good enough to fly and navigate from I chose to use a video switcher so I could switch between my TBS-69 flight cam and the FLIR.

Another feature I added to the system was a very simple and cheap servo controlled gimbal from HobbyKing. A super smooth expensive brushless gimbal is nice but just not super necessary the way this camera is used. Its not for filming or getting that "perfect" shot so the simplicity, cost and ease of set up of the servo gimbal wins out. Honestly if I didn't need the "tilt down" feature a gimbal would not be necessary at all. In fact my first flights with the FLIR were simply attached with double sided tape to the Disco frame.

I should mention that "jello" just is not a factor with the FLIR. It is nice to be able to tilt the camera up and down. If the camera see's to much sky then it tends to wash out the ground but not to a point that you can not see anything or navigate. Tilting down at the ground and taking the big "cool" sky out of the picture brightens up details on the ground. Remember the FLIR see's Thermal Energy and "light" has nothing to do with the image other than the thermal energy it produces. For example the FLIR camera can NOT see through a window but it will show up as a large black or white area depending on the temperature of the glass its self and the color pallet the pilot has selected. However the "details" in the thermal image ot the VUE is amazing considering that you are actually looking differential temperature of objects. This is attributed directly to the quality of the FLIR VUE cameras sensor. You can see ripples on the water or shadows on the ground just due to the differing temperatures that are given off.

This is raw footage of a short flight during a very dark and very moonless night. I literally could not see 5 feet in front of me.  Day or night the FLIR VUE does not care. Infact the images in day or night look pretty much identical. Remember this is RAW footage so feel free to skip forward. Shortly after the flight began my goggle battery went dead so I had to RTB using the small TBS ground station screne.

I noticed the other day while I was filming a structure fire (with the permission and blessing of the Fire Chief of course) that I could only see the heavy smoke as it left the fire, as it rose up it was very hard to detect with the FLIR. It was a good thing to because I couldn't see anything with my normal flight cam and had to descend for a landing using the FLIR cam. When I talked to the Fire Chief on scene, he was excited to see the images I could capture with the FLIR cam from such a vantage point. After observing through my spare set of goggles he was able to more effectivly deploy his assets. The metal roof on the building was making it hard to get water to the attic fire in this small structure.  It should be noted that I live in a very small town and I personally know most of the volunteer Firemen.  This made it very easy for me to gain access to the area and get permission to fly.  I would NOT reccomend flying in a situation like this without coordination and a plan. This was a flight of opportunity and I jumped on it to test the FLIR cam in a real world fire. It turned out to be a valuable tool to our small fire department and they infact now use this footage for training.  Also, it is about 11:00 o'clock in the morning and as you can see the images are not that different than the night flight above.

Finding cattle, wildlife, people or anything significantly warmer than the environment it is in is as easy as can be. They just show up brighter than everything around them. The uses for this camera are endless. I was hovering over my house looking at the roof and I could see hot and cold spots. I could even actually make out where the rafters were under the roof......almost like X-Ray vision....LOL!
Day time or night time make no difference in the image you see through the FLIR. Night flights are as easy as a day time flight except when I switch from FLIR to my normal flight cam which at night is useless.....obviously! The FLIR does have its limits though. for example finding someone standing against warm rocks or ground can be difficult because they are the same temperature as their environment.......or finding someone in a cold environment that is well insulated from the cold. However, SOMETHING usually will stand out like movement or an uninsulated face then you can switch the color pallets to get a better contrast of the image and make it easy to see what you are looking at. 

The cost you ask?......well it is only $9.95!!!
That is a total lie! The cost is actually in the two thousand dollar price range........yea.... I know, not really "hobby grade" pricing but it is about half of the cost of the TAU Camera witch is the FLIR camera that this one is based on. Like I said this is a TAU stripped of a few firmware features and a Bluetooth and recorder added along with a control app.....In my opinion it is a better camera for less, for "Drone" use. I dont know much about marketing or what exactly FLIR has in mind for this camera but I believe their intention is to market it to more of a professional type hobbyist that is building a business where this camera would be more useful than just a normal light spectrum camera. Search and Rescue, Roofing and insulation, high tension power monitoring, Fire monitoring, Animal tracking/monitoring, Law Enforcement, Solar Panel Survey.......on and on.