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 where they supposedly do not affect the circuit from the guitar to the amplifier 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...

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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 was any noticeable hot spot in their circuitry. The only differences in the images that I noticed are 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... 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 I've seen that the thermal imaging cameras will pick up on our radiation in the mirror, this led me to question if these hot spots are from the circuitry, reflected radiation from my body, or some sort of combination of the two. Since the thermal notes of the pickups of the guitar change with the angle at which I photographed it, I was pushed more towards believing that these "hot spots" were primarily resulting from my body... What do you think?