Inexpensive IR viewer options
Posted in Hardware
From Benjamin Judkewitz:
I needed an IR viewer to see a Ti:S beam and was really surprised to find that most viewers still sell for > 1000 € (or $). Visualizing NIR used to be really simple with smartphones (enabling public installations like this one by JPL/NASA), but that was before nearly all makers started to include IR-stop filters. I recently found car dash-cams to be a convenient solution. They don’t have IR-filters, have small screens, are portable – and ~50x cheaper, for example this one.
Baby monitors that have a night vision mode might work too.
Here it is in action:
https://vid.me/WW8r
Don’t forget, most USB webcams will do this as well. You have to clip off the IR filter, but 90% of the time, that takes about 10 minutes. In my experience, the cheaper the webcam, the easier peeling off the filter is. Obviously, not portable like this, but worth thinking about for some applications.
I have tried using dash-cams but find that the battery life is typically very short – a few 10s of minutes. Has anyone ever come across a cheap option with a relatively long-life battery?
This is from Amanda J Foust:
Fantastic webcams for ergonomic, safe IR laser alignment. No IR filter to remove. HD. Manual focus. <$10!!! https://www.amazon.co.uk/Andoer-2-0-50-0-m-Webcam-Camera-Computer-x/dp/B00MXUVX42/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1497609309&sr=8-1&keywords=B00MXUVX42
I can’t find the exact model from US amazon, but this one looks similar:
https://www.amazon.com/KKmoon-Megapixel-Microphone-Desktop-Computer/dp/B01DBRFQDO/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1497609347&sr=8-3&keywords=kkmoon+usb+webcam
[…] dangerous thing to deal with. IR viewer cards and IR viewers, or less expensive solutions based on simple cameras/webcams, can make the beam visible to our human eye, but I always found this very exhausting to work with. […]