Brandon's Thermal Imaging

This is the page for Brandon's Thermal Imaging Project.

For my project, I wanted to test the capabilities of the Seek Thermal Imaging Camera to show hot spots in electrical circuits. I thought a good way to do this would be to take thermal images of my electric guitar and effects pedals while plugged into an amplifier. An interesting thing about effects pedals is that they claim to have this thing called passive stand-by (bypass) where the pedals do not affect the signal from the guitar unless engaged with the press of a foot switch. I thought it would be interesting to try to see a difference in this with the use of the thermal imaging camera... These are the images that I took:

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The first three pictures were taken of the guitar (with a focus on the pick-ups and volume/tone knobs) to see if there were any "hot spots" in the pickups. The only differences in the images that I noticed are that certain parts of the pick-ups appear to be hotter in different pictures. It is worth noting that they were taken at different angles with respect to the guitar, which led me to believe that there is more to the thermal images of these things than simple detection of electrical hot spots. The remaining images were taken of the pedals in passive and active mode, which I was not able to distinguish by only looking at the images. In every thermal image that I took of my pedals and the guitar, there is a hot spot in an area that is covered in a chrome, mirror-like surface. Since the thermal imaging cameras will pick up on our radiation in the mirror, this leads to the question of whether these hot spots are from the circuitry, reflected radiation from my body, or some sort of combination of the two. The final image is of the leg of my guitar stand which has no electrical components in it but still showed a hot spot area. Since the thermal notes of the pickups of the guitar change with the angle at which I photographed it, it seems most likely that these "hot spots" were primarily resulting from my body... What do you think?