Flyingfishfinger,
To answer your question……
1. Resolution is not King if performance is severely lacking in other areas such as image noise and lens quality.
2. The Seek Thermal Mosaic Core is a 2 part design. The ‘front’ PCB contains the microbolometer and a few ancillary components such as an LDO, and sometimes a small ARM processor chip. The PCB dimensions are those of the width and height of the mosaic module. The second PCB is on the end of a flex cable and is the same dimensions as the front (microbolometer) PCB. It is mounted remotely to address some local heating issues.
3. If you dismantle the Seek Mosaic core you will have a microbolometer PCB with a solenoid module that drives the FFC shutter. The lens assembly is part of the chassis module. If you remove the FFC shutter assembly you end up with a PCB that is very low profile but unusable ! The SeeK thermal camera cores need the FFC shutter assembly to work and a lens is still needed to focus the scene onto the microbolometer. All will add thickness and bulk to the core assembly.
4. Seek Thermal did a decent job of the compact QVGA thermal imaging core hardware design. It cannot be made much smaller without some serious challenges along the way. They produced the smaller imaging core with lower resolution and no FFC shutter to serve a market that needs a tiny imaging core as a priority and is willing to accept the compromised performance that results.
5. If you want a decent quality thermal imaging core that will definitely challenge the Seek Thermal imaging cores in the marketplace, I recommend that you look at the Infiray S0 and it’s smaller brother, the Tiny1. I believe the Tiny1 to be used in the UTI-260b camera that is receiving good reviews. Guide Sensmart offer the TIMO core series in two resolution and these may also be worth a look, though I personally like the Infiray offerings.
As a final comment, you need to compare the Seek QVGA core imaging performance with that of an Infiray S0 core before making a decision to go with a Seek Thermal product. I think you will be surprised ! As I said at the beginning…. Slightly better resolution can be worthless if a core suffers from high levels of image noise and is lacking in image processing performance. The Infiray cores are also 25fps update
If I were to build a thermal ‘endoscope’ or ‘borescope’ I would use the Infiray Tiny1 imaging core in the head assembly.
Fraser