SPi RazIR mini thermal camera -Teardown and comment

[Fraser]

It appears to be a tweaked version of the Hirose MQ172 series. Datasheet attached.

Fraser

[Fraser]

The 4 pin mini USB lead has arrived.

It certainly looks the same as what is required and the main dimensions match.
The normal 4 pin HIROSE type mini USB plug has three alignment 'keys', one wide one at the mid point and one at each edge. The 'keys' at the edges need to be removed in order to use the plug with the RazIR/M series cameras. The removal of the two thin 'keys' appears quite simple and I shall first try a scalpel. If that does not work, a very fine file should make short work of them

I then need to check for correct fit and pinout compatibility with the standard USB A plug at the other end of the lead.

I previously stated that this USB port is used for video output as well as USB comms. That was incorrect. I have the video cable and it plugs into another port on the side.

More on this when I get a chance to play with the USB lead

Fraser

[Fraser]

A useful picture I just found, showing different digital camera communications connectors.
Keep it safe somewhere, it could have saved me quite a lot of time searching !

Fraser

[Fraser]

Well I just found a really interesting cable OEM site. Very useful !

It shows the type of 4 pin HIROSE USB connector that the RazIR/M series uses. It even includes the wiring details. I still need to check the camera pinout though.

http://www.dcscsi.com/product/363.html

Another source of cable connector identification pictures

http://www.dcscsi.com/product/cat-6.html

Fraser

[Fraser]

Cable connector modified with ease........ it fits ! I did have to slightly modify the connectors outer plastic case as it was too large to allow the plug to fully seat in the slightly recessed socket. I actually removed more material than was required.

The wiring of this generic cable was correct for the RazIR/M3.

Once connected to the PC, I was able to access the cameras stored images and make radiometric measurements. Different palettes may be selected and the .IRI radiometric files may be saved as .BMP or .JPG for easy viewing.

I provide some pictures of the cable connector modification and some pictures of Oliver downloaded from my camera. I tried different palettes as well. The saved images are at original resolution and are not upscaled so they are quire small.

Fraser

[Fraser]

Pictures of Oliver........

[jagans]

Hi there. I bought one of these for 6500 dollars from SPI quite a few years ago. They no longer support these cameras, and when you could get them the batteries, a lousy 3.7 volt Lipon brick, was around 110 dollars. INSANE! I guess it was for an IR camera so they figured, why not rip them off, they were already stupid enough to pay 6500 for a POS. These cameras cannot take the rigors of outdoor PM use. They are like toys or like a Chinese Sailboat, JUNK. Companies tat do not support what they sell are assholes. HP did it with plotter drivers. These companies should be ashamed of themselves. LG is another one. Lousy Engineering, Lousy Products, Lousy support. $6500 dollars is still a lot of money to me. Im not the government that steals everyones income and calls it taxes.

[jean-paul]

Hello,

I bought that camera 2 weeks ago. It 's good for the price! FOV is perfect, and manual focus is good when you take pictures inside!

But it seems that there's a bug in the software, when you export a picture from their proprietary format (IRI) to bmp/jpg without the palette you cannot remove the min/max temperature.

So I tried to reverse engineered their file format and I managed to display pictures, but it’s in “raw” format. Do you have an idea on how to convert it to a radiometric image? It seems that it depends on the camera internal temperature ?

Thank you,

[jean-paul]

Hello,

I managed to reverse engineered a part of their IRI file but I haven't managed to find out the formula to get temperature from raw data.

The good thing is that the Guide software tell you the raw value and the corresponding temperature, so I did a table with a fixed emissivity, humidity, distance and a variable ambient temperature.

Then I did a regression using this formula : https://github.com/cran/Thermimage/blob/master/R/raw2temp.R

The problem is that there are 5 unknown! So I did an optimization with 2 differents ambient temperature. With a fixed ambient temperature it works great but if ambient temperature changes then it's not working anymore