Earlier this year, Cat Phones released the "most advanced thermal imaging smartphone," the Cat S62 Pro. The smartphone, as the name suggests, features a thermal imaging system powered by FLIR Lepton, rugged features that Cat phones are known to offer, and much more. The phone was made available in the United States earlier this year, and now the company has released a software development kit that will allow developers to make the use of the smartphone to its true potential.
Today, the Cat phones announced the availability of a software development kit (SDK) for the S62 Pro smartphone. This SDK will allow third-party developers to integrate or use the FLIR Lepton thermal imaging system of the S62 Pro camera in their apps. For those of you who don't remember, the Cat S62 Pro smartphone features the FLIR Lepton sensor and the MyFLIR Pro app which allows its users to visualize heat energy, allows users to see through obscurants, and even in total darkness and measure surface temperature. And now, the smartphone that can be dunked in water, washed with soap, and that thrown in the sand can make use of the thermal camera in third-party apps. Of course, this is if the developer integrates it in their apps.
Cat says the SDK will allow developers to invoke many of the market-leading features in the phone, making it an even more powerful and versatile tool. The company says that there are tools that bring clarity and context to thermal images, using Teledyne FLIR’s MSX® technology that overlays outline detail from the visual camera over the thermal image, as well as alpha-blending that makes it possible to overlay thermal detail as a translucent layer over a visual image. It also says that the measurement tools such as the movable spot meters and scalable regions of interest can be added to the thermal data or captured images to extract temperature data. In addition, the phone has a color pallette feature that allows users to set a choice of settings to visualize different temperatures with various color schemes.
On the availability of the SDK, Tim Shepherd, Senior Director of Applications at Bullitt Group, said:
"Our thermal imaging phones are used in thousands of scenarios, from checking for machinery faults, overheating components, leaking pipework, poorly-fitted insulation, and overloaded circuitry, to monitoring equipment, identifying heat sources, and spotting animals or people in the dark. We have received many requests from customers to allow them to bring thermal imaging to their own line-of-business apps, and so we are excited to be making this SDK available and to see what new and innovative use cases our customers and third-party developers come up with.”
In case you're a developer, or you're just interested in taking a look at the SDK, it can be accessed from here.