By heat

It sees a body in complete darkness

A thermal camera reads the temperature of everything in front of it, so a warm animal stands out against cold ground with no light at all — and nothing for an animal to notice.

The camera streams two pictures at once: an image to look at, and behind it the temperature of every pixel. Strixeo keeps both. A warm shape that moves against a cold background is what wakes the camera, and the degrees are written down beside the photograph so a sighting can be re-examined months later rather than believed.

That is the part worth having. Most thermal products show you a pretty false-colour image and throw the numbers away; keeping them is what lets us say a deer was 16.6 °C above its background rather than that it looked warm.

Where it stops — corrected 23 October 2026. This said heat detects but never identifies. That stopped being true in September. The thermal frame is cropped to the warm body the trigger already measured and handed to the same species model an ordinary photograph goes to — no second detector is asked, because the blob is the box.

What it really stops at is size. Measured over 576 field frames: nothing is named below about a twentieth of the frame, roughly one in six between a tenth and a fifth, and about three quarters above two fifths. The red fox at 93 % and the cattle at 94 % on How far it sees were named from heat alone; the roe deer at 110–120 m, eleven pixels tall, never could be. Heat also carries no colour and no markings, so where two species differ only in those, it will not separate them.

What we support

One camera today, by name. The protocol is an open one, so other modules using it should work — but “should” is not “does”, and we will not list a device we have not held.

Camera	Status	Notes
Thermal Master T2 Max `USB 3474:4161`	Supported	256×192 sensor, 15 mm lens. Recognised by name; the app reads both its picture and its temperature plane.
Other InfiRay-protocol modules	Should work	Same packed stream and the same frame layout. Untested — if you have one and try it, we would like to hear what happened.
FLIR One, Seek Thermal	Not supported	Different protocols, each needing its own work. Not refused on principle, simply not done.

What we have tested

Ourselves, on real hardware. Tested means we have run it and can say what happened. Should work means the protocol matches and nobody has tried it yet. We do not merge the two.

Tested on	Result	Notes
Oukitel WP61	Works	Our main field phone. Needed a MediaTek-specific USB fix before frames arrived intact — without it roughly one frame in eight was corrupt in a way that looked like a broken camera.
Unihertz Atom	Works	A small rugged handset, and a good one to leave outside.

Almost everything interesting happens while we are asleep. That is the honest reason most people have no idea what shares their ground — not indifference, just that the hours do not overlap. A flash reaches a few metres and announces itself; heat reaches further and announces nothing. This is the sense that makes the invisible half of the day visible, and it is the one worth paying for.

And it flies. The same camera, clipped to a used consumer drone with a printed cradle, lifted and handled normally on 16 October — a few hundred euro against the several thousand a thermal drone costs. Nothing beyond the flight is built yet: every measurement here assumes a camera standing still. What we tried, and what it would take →

The degrees are relative, not absolute. The camera has no shutter, so its zero drifts by a few degrees across a night. The difference between an animal and its background is reliable; the bare number is not, and we never show it as one.

Warm ground used to look exactly like an animal. A strip of earth that has had sun on it is hot, large and compact, which is everything the trigger was looking for. On one September evening 22 real objects produced 9,046 arrivals, and 1,766 photographs held 22 frames worth naming.

The rule that fixes it is movement: a warm shape has to actually go somewhere — about a tenth of the frame’s width from where it first appeared — before it is worth a photograph, and anything that has sat still for ten minutes is treated as scenery and stops raising anything at all. That threshold is provisional, reasoned rather than measured, because no night had ever recorded how far individual objects travel — and the field data now being gathered is what will correct it.