Seek Thermal release new EAGLE cores, including 640 x 480 pixels. - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Fraser
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2025, 05:12:00 pm
content: Seek have just sent me news of their latest thermal imaging core release.The new core is the “EAGLE” and the range includes a 640 x 480 pixel resolution modelhttps://www.thermal.com/eagle-core.htmlFraser

author: Fraser
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2025, 05:52:37 pm
content: In light of the recent POTUS tariffs on China, this is good timing by Seek Thermal.I hope that they have made some nice competitive imaging coresSadly, last time I asked, they were not interested in loaning me a unit to test and review for the forum. I may ask again now that the new cores have been released.Fraser

author: DaneLaw
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2025, 02:27:49 am
content: Quote from: Fraser on April 29, 2025, 05:52:37 pmSeek is like many American companies heavily entangled with China, and many companies in the USA have exploited "Made in USA" for lowhanging goodwill, while the full story is a tad more complex.But I wouldn't be surprised if Seek Thermal as a USA company, are way more into bed with China than what they like to indicate, and we will see added tariffs down the line on their products also, even though "American made, & USA company and all that jazz".// Yep, Looks like Seek Thermal also put up a notice a little over a week back, and would implement tariffs, and admitting that they get a significant part of their components from China.Though not that extreme.. Fx a consumer product like fx ShotPro seems to have 175$ included as tariffs with a price of 674$.https://shop.thermal.com/seek-shot-proA letter from CEO of Seek Thermal Mike Muench explaining the new tariffs.https://www.thermal.com/uploads/1/0/1/3/101388544/seek-thermal-tariff-letter_4-18-2025.pdf

author: gabiz_ro
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2025, 06:42:48 am
content: I don't think price will be very attractive.With export regulations for anything greater than 9 FPS also some trouble, but for US may be OK

author: 5U4GB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2025, 12:55:17 pm
content: Quote from: gabiz_ro on April 30, 2025, 06:42:48 amCame here to say the same thing, the problem isn't tariffs getting things into the US, it's EAR preventing you from getting them out of the US. So the rest of the world probably has to wait until you can get equivalents from China.

author: ArsenioDev
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2025, 01:49:17 pm
content: Quote from: 5U4GB on April 30, 2025, 12:55:17 pmThese are 600 series items, so if you're in STA-1 its a signed form saying you wont use it for weapons and you're good to go with a call to BIS.

author: Bill W
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2025, 09:40:22 pm
content: Quote from: ArsenioDev on April 30, 2025, 01:49:17 pmAlthough that presumes a seller who can be bothered to process the form.Fine for commercial end users, most won't want to take the risk with a random 'Joe Bloggs' / 'Guiseppi Bloggatto' foreign private buyer

author: gabiz_ro
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: May 01, 2025, 06:13:59 am
content: Now on tpoic.Interface is now CSI, maybe will ofer some CSI to USB addon.Since resolution is OK and framerate enough, nothing to hack, except if they go same way as Mosaic and offer a lower framerate version.

author: dalittle
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: May 01, 2025, 11:33:03 pm
content: This is interesting.If you know the tariff schedule, and can hypothesize on the components in each subassembly, you can almost back into their cost of goods sold based on this tariff schedule, as well as get an indication of how dependent they are on China when sourcing their bits. Hmmm.Back in my day, we sourced custom plastic parts from China but all they did was push the plastics. We provided them with everything including the plastic itself. The molds were way cheaper in China. Problem was, we had to discard a higher-than-normal percentage of incoming parts because they failed QC. That said, it was still cheaper. We also used to source germanium aspheric lenses for our firefighting cameras from China because they were cheap. They were pretty sh*t too but good enough for firefighting cameras. Not good enough for other apps. Seems our colleagues over at SEEK may be a bit more exposed than we would have been.

author: Vipitis
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 03, 2025, 11:14:23 pm
content: Are these again Raytheon cores? If yes, they likely aren't designed to be seek first. So what is the Raytheon product that makes of of these cores... If at all known.I suspect they might do binning for quality and performance, where seek is the lower bin.

author: tske
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: May 05, 2025, 12:12:02 pm
content: Quote from: Vipitis on May 03, 2025, 11:14:23 pmYou mean the older Seek are actually made by Raytheon?

author: Fraser
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 05, 2025, 12:20:41 pm
content: Seek Thermal are in a partnership with Raytheon. Raytheon fabricate the microbolometers for Seek Thermal.See this “About Seek Thermal” intro …….“ About Seek ThermalSeek The Unseen® - An unseen world of energy surrounds us. We only see some of it with our eyes, light from a source of energy reflected on objects around us. But even though we can’t see it, all objects produce or retain heat. When viewed through a Seek Thermal camera, this world of heat can be converted to images, providing important information useful in solving everyday problems that are otherwise invisible to the naked eye. Seek thermal imaging let’s you see the world of heat instead of the world of light.Proven Track Record - The company was founded in 2012by two industry pioneering scientists, Bill Parrish, PhD and Tim Fitzgibbons PhD (hyperlink names to bios), who spent 40 years advancing the state of military and professional-grade thermal imaging technology. Following their previous two companies, Amber Engineering and Indigo Systems, each with successful acquisitions, Seek Thermal is their third venture with the mission to make thermal imaging a part of everyday life.Built for Quality and Scale - Seek Thermal is partnered with Raytheon and NXP to design and deliver high-quality, affordable thermal imaging sensors and products across the globe at scale. As one of the few companies in the world capable of building sensors, Seek Thermal has shipped hundreds of thousands of thermal imaging products around the world as it continues to make thermal imaging an accessible, everyday tool, so people can do their jobs safer, faster and smarter.”

author: dalittle
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: May 05, 2025, 11:26:09 pm
content: For whatever it’s worth, I have an pretty strong opinion on Bill Parrish. Bill is probably the most significant technical person in the thermal imaging industry worldwide. He founded several successful companies. One was Amber Infrared (I think their circa 1995 microbolometer product was called the Sentinel). The Sentinel was, in my view, one of the best. Small and kinda like Agema quality, which if you can recall, was very good. I recall having many conversations with Art Stout who headed-up Agema back in the 1990s about their technology. Art today (I think still) works for Flir Systems. These conversations were post-Parrish era as he was on his way to Indigo at that time, or already there. Indigo Systems made their own VOx focal planes and marketed them as a part of an engine product offering. I think (by memory) it was named the Alpha, then succeeded by the Indigo Omega engine, a 320X240 VOx core. Very small at the time. Indigo’s detectors were based on the Honeywell patent. In fact, everything was based on the Honeywell patent. Sofradir (later on Ulis) claimed that theirs were different, but a judge said theirs too was based on the Honeywell design. Anyway, the first MSA Evolution 5000 cameras used an Indigo core, as did many other cameras. Indigo was sold to Flir later on for what we thought at the time was a crazy valuation. The Indigo acquisition gave Flir the capability of making their own detectors. All of us in the industry should thank Bill because the FLIR/Indigo deal set an expectation for the value of a thermal imaging technology developer company.The only other person that I think equals Bill Parrish is Paul Kruse. Paul was the brains behind the Honeywell microbolometer patent. He left Honeywell and later owned a small company in Minneapolis named Infrared Solutions Inc., which was later acquired by Danaher/Fluke. The thermal imaging visionary at Danaher was Jim Lico. Jim’s sidekick was the President of Raytek. Carl something? I can’t remember his name, but I can see his face in my mind. I was lucky enough to have known all of them. Glad to have lived through that era in the infrared field.On a separate path and slightly earlier (before solid state) were the boys at EEV in Chelmsford England. They did great cutting-edge work for the Royal Navy, then for the fire services worldwide. EEV was fire oriented while the US boys (Parrish et al) were not. Charles Humpoletz at EEV and his crew did some amazing work. Later on, Charles went on to establish ISG, and e2v eventually sold the Argus division to Avon Protection, and it’s still there today.With that said, that concludes our thermal imaging history lesson for the day!!

author: Fraser
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 05, 2025, 11:51:51 pm
content: Thank you for sharing this historyIt was because of Bill Parish’s excellent reputation that I expected great things to come out of Seek Thermal. They wanted to produce affordable thermal imaging systems for the masses and appear to have the skills to achieve this. I was disappointed with the first SEEK Thermal mobile phone dongle as its imagery was very noisy and not truly competitive in this respect with products using ULIS microbolometers. There was also the court case where FLIR stated that FLIR owned copyright on the microbolometer they used in the Lepton core had been breached by SEEK Thermal via Ex FLIR employees having privileged knowledge now working at SEEK Thermal. As a result of that case, every 15th pixel in the SEEK Thermal microbolometer was deleted as a punitive measure against them. Thankfully later generations of SEEK Thermal microbolometer did not require the pixel deletion and there has been improvement in the noise seen in SEEK Thermal camera imagery. I have wanted SEEK Thermal to succeed but their microbolometers and noise processing has left something to be desired for me. Hopefully the new Eagle cores will impress. Sadly SEEK Thermal have no interest in loaning out demo boards for review so we will have to wait for camera reviews from owners in due course.I own Amber, Indigo, FLIR and SEEK Thermal cameras and have a lot of respect for Bill Parish.Fraser

author: IR_Geek
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: May 06, 2025, 12:57:50 am
content: I second the thank you for sharing the history! You get it ... the names of the companies may have changed, but the people behind it determine where the innovation flourishes.I've been using IR cameras since 01 and started with Inframetrics 760's and Amber Galileo's to collect field data for LW and MW data respectively. Amazing how the technology has evolved since then. The whole technology has been so fascinating that I've pulled down paper after paper and book after book to learn more. Enjoyed setting down for days learning everything I could about every camera I've used over the years. Kruse's book from 2001 was very helpful early in my career. Ever since then I've been keeping a history of who purchased who over the years. From your history lesson I could swear we have spoken before ...

author: DaneLaw
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 06, 2025, 01:02:48 am
content: They did what they wanted to do.. "Bring thermal to the consumer masses".320x240 (76.800 pixels) at sub 500 was quite remarkable back in 2016/17.This level of thermal video-footage was not cheap back in the second half of the 2010s, though the market been flipped quite a bit over the last decade with China's mass production of uncooled FPAs..Really liked Seek's ability to lock the span in their app, and the manual focus on their units.Also been quite fond of Seek's Tyrian-palette/LUTThey also don't seem to implement a lot of image processing.99 $ (2025/US CompactPro Fast Frame vers. 18Hz Seek's US Store)

author: Bill W
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 12, 2025, 12:12:47 am
content: Quote from: dalittle on May 05, 2025, 11:26:09 pmCorrect Dave - I had one of the early Indigo Alphas as a candidate for putting in Argus2 (?) but we (e2v) went Raytheon BST........ eventually (which is another long story).https://www.eevblog.com/forum/thermal-imaging/indigo-alpha-lens-focus-issue/Bill