𝒍𝒆𝒎𝒂𝒏𝒏

The hospitals in my nearby city have their own BRT which is open to public use, and joined to the city’s ticketing system. It shuttles between them and various key locations, and is of course wholly subsidized for the intended users.

Despite being the only BRT here it pretty much goes everywhere it should, skipping the usual traffic, and as a result gets a lot of use.

If the users were limited to the regular transportation I think they would just all drive - while there are a lot of routes here they’re not entirely pleasant to use IMO and almost always get stuck in traffic

I have a steam deck, and while its somewhat portable, I wouldn’t want to carry one just to use at a charging station, considering the alternative is a controller stashed away in the glovebox. Probably also would want to carry the deck whenever leaving the vehicle too, considering how common it is in certain regions for some tesla models to be broken into and boot emptied out (apparently preventable with a 3d printed shim).

With the crazy powerful GPUs in these cars IMO it’s practically free to enable this functionality for the user when the car is stationary, on a screen that is much, much larger and with a nicer sound system compared to any handheld or phone

IMO more accurate presence detection. Common sensors like PIR and cheaper doppler radar types can detect when there’s motion, but not if a user is present but not moving in the detection area (e.g. sleeping or sitting). There’s also open source projects that can track bluetooth wearables & phones to know who specifically is in a room, but these aren’t able to detect people with no devices, say guests and kids.

The preferred approach at the moment is a combination of sensors to cover motion and person detection separately, which comes at a cost, both on your pocket and the time needed to get it working suitably for your needs, or maybe one of the more expensive radar sensors like the FP2 that can detect where in a space is occupied with higher accuracy than more affordable alternatives

The thermal cam is roughly in the same price range as the FP2 - however since it has I2C, something cheap like an ESP8266 can be used to turn it into a WiFi based presence detection sensor. Something like an ESP32 could be used to turn it into a presence detector and wearable tracker, negating the need for another separate sensor entirely.

Something like this would probably be quite close to plug and play for someone DIY focused, and wouldn’t have the same problem as radar being able to see through walls to different areas, although this is somewhat solved by surrounding the rear of the sensor in foil with caveats.

I’m interested in how it performs outdoors in rain though, a lot of existing affordable sensors (except PIR) struggle a little in wet conditions, with doppler based ones not detecting anything

Yepp I agree lol, coverage about him/his companies gets old really fast…

Even worse when its stuff like laying off the one of his companies’ most profitable business units over a childish disagreement 🤦‍♂️ just to reverse the decision after reporters start spamming his antics everywhere, leading to more spam.

Feel like he likes to see his name in the news or something, very tiring IMO

The !electronics@discuss.tchncs.de community would be a better fit for this post IMO

That said this looks interesting, and seems really competitively priced when compared to other similar thermal cameras like the Flir One Gen 3. This measures a very wide temperature range too, from -20°C to 400°C within ±2°C, whereas the Gen 3 tops out at 120°C.

The 80x62 resolution is OK for this application IMO, the Gen 3 is similar at 80x60.

I wouldn’t go recommending one of these to a “casual” user though, it’s very much a development product. Non-casual users could probably 3d print a case and get on just fine with the demo apps IMO, and for those users this would probably worth its weight in gold, given how expensive thermal imaging usually is.

Given how closely its priced to radar presence sensors like the Aqara FP2, and the inclusion of I2C for comms, I think this is going to have some appeal to DIY home automation enthusiasts too, especially if it gets supported by open source projects like ESPHome

Technical docs: https://www.waveshare.com/wiki/Thermal_Camera_HAT