TIL a guy at a repair shop in Austin taught me about using a thermal camera for finding shorts

Honestly, I was just dropping off a power supply for a quote at Austin Electronics Repair last Tuesday. This older tech saw me struggling with a burnt board on my own time, and he let me borrow his $150 thermal cam for 5 minutes. Ngl, I found a cracked solder joint under a capacitor in like 20 seconds that I'd been probing for an hour. Has anyone else tried one of those cheap seek thermal cameras for board work, or are they all just gimmicks?

2 comments

2 Comments

adam_lewis1mo ago

Maybe it's just me but I always figured those thermal cameras were more for finding hot spots on house wiring or checking for insulation gaps. Using one to spot a cracked joint under a cap is pretty clever though, never would have crossed my mind for component level stuff. Idk if the cheap ones are worth it for that or if you'd need the kind of resolution that costs more than a weekend project budget. The real trick might be knowing what temperature difference you're actually looking for, a cold joint versus a short can look real similar if you don't already know the board.

milesj701mo ago

Why not just learn to read a schematic and use a multimeter properly instead of spending money on a fancy camera that'll sit in a drawer most of the time... The cheap thermal cameras you can plug into a phone are pretty useless for finding a tiny cold joint under a blob of epoxy or a cap, the resolution just isn't there for that kind of detail. You'd have to drop a couple hundred bucks on a decent standalone unit to get the pixel density to spot a cracked solder ball, and at that point you're spending more on the tool than the board you're fixing. The real issue is exactly what you said - you need to already know what a normal operating temp looks like on that specific circuit, which if you're already that familiar with the board you probably know where the problem is without the camera. Seems like a solution looking for a problem for component level work, I'd rather put that money into a good scope or a nicer soldering station.