Hi!
I’m making a fire-extenguishing robot. I’ve got most of it built, and a lot planned out. I’m going to use computer vision (OpenCV based) to do most of the detection of “fire”, but I’d really like a temperature sensor-like thing to verify high temperatures before indiscriminately spraying liquid CO2 on things.
I have found some thermopiles that could fit the bill, but they are really quite expensive. Far more expensive than say, a TempGun is. I’m on a budget, because I’m an artist (read: broke), and it seems rediculious that the sensors like in the TempGun can’t be had for less than 200$, yet the tempgun itself is 25
I was wondering if anyone at SparkFun or around here has hacked with a TempGun, and if there is a pin on it you can pull a temperature reading from, or in some way get a Tempgun to interface with a computer, arduino, or anything computational.
Thanks a bunch.
I think what you want is an infrared flame sensor. You can google that one and get some hits.
I don’t know what it’s called, but extinguisher robots are part of the regular small robot games that have sumo and everything. It’s been years since I’ve been into that kind of thing, but they would have a small house mockup and the robot would have to roam the house looking for a lit candle and put it out. They would be timed.
Commercial flame sensors have several (normally 2 or 3) detectors that operate on different wavelengths, with some clever discriminating circuitry. You need to be able to distinguish between things like the hot filaments in a light globe and a real fire, which you can’t really do with a single sensor.
I’ve been curious about those, but from what I’ve read, flame sensors seem a poor fit. The big problem being that I am going to build and use this mostly in an industrial arts space, where people are welding about 18 hours a day somewhere.
All the flame detectors I’ve seen have some caveat somewhere that welding will throw a false positive, and that they basically use clever visible light filters to select infra-red frequencies that fire likely puts out (and welding will always put out). Some of these filters will even recognise reflected welding-arc as fire. If you’ve had a different experience, I’d love to hear from actual experience.
There are some industrial fire-sensors that use a relatively powerful microprocessor, two cameras, and a lot of computation to distinguish between what is likely fire and what is likely not, but I am not entirely sure if they will satisfy my desires, because I’d like the ability to pick up Methanol fires (nearly colorless, and extremely low IR emissions), and so far as I can tell, flame detectors aren’t going to do that, and will never do that for under $500.