Gadget Review: HIKMICRO D02 Thermal Camera ★★★★★

The good folks at Hikmicro have sent me their D02 Infrared Camera to review. It's part of their "Eco" series of thermal imagers - designed to be easy to use around the home and relatively cheap. Despite the no-fills appearance, it packs in a lot of features which put some more expensive models to shame. It even works with Linux. Shove in a USB-C cable to grab the photos or even use it as a webcam. All the images you see in this post are unaltered. I haven't optimised them or stripped the metadata; what you see is what you get. Let's go! Specs and Pictures Infrared cameras usually have tiny sensors - the D02 is no different, you get 96x96 pixels of thermal information upscaled to 240x240. Where the D02 shines is that it also has an optical camera just below the thermal sensor. This allows the camera to combine both the thermal and optical images into one "fusion" image. Here's an example of the thermal image: The optical image has a higher resolution - 480x640: It isn't the highest…