Flir E4 Thermal imaging camera teardown

[mikeselectricstuff]

Just a thought on the mystery of the higher temperature resolution spec for the E6/8 - I wonder if they just reduce the amount of noise they add - anyone have access to one to dump the conf.cfg file?
 

[Taucher]

Just a thought on the mystery of the higher temperature resolution spec for the E6/8 - I wonder if they just reduce the amount of noise they add - anyone have access to one to dump the conf.cfg file?

That's my assumption all along... spec sheet ...

Btw - while playing with the menu I've read some fragments that contained "time lapse" ... if somebody wants to dive into that...
... and I'll probably declare the menu Beta1 an useable state and leave it at beta1 - at least for some time now.

[olsenn]

I just spoke to someone at tequipment.net. They will (supposedly) be getting 75 new E4 cameras in next week. One of those will be mine

[BigClive]

And another E4 sale based purely on Mikes original teardown before the hack.  I was impressed with the edge detection overlay, but the full resolution hack is very tempting to apply when it arrives.

Hopefully Flir will know that when the technical geeks get affordable test equipment they tend to stick with that brand due to familiarity.  It certainly didn't do Microchip any harm when they made microcontroller development tools affordable for the masses.

[Corporate666]

I just spoke to someone at tequipment.net. They will (supposedly) be getting 75 new E4 cameras in next week. One of those will be mine

 

I just ordered another one from TEquipment.  My brother in law loved my i7 and an E4 will make a great present. 

FLIR is going to bankrupt me 

For what it's worth to the FLIR people reading, I would have not bought EITHER of my E4's if it was not for the hack, nor would I have bought any camera from you.  I was fine with my i7, but the hack made it too good to pass up, so I've bought two.

Please consider the popularity of this camera due to the hackability, as well as the fact that none of us would have bought an E8 (most of us would not have bought an E4 either), if it were not for this hack.  You are not losing money, you are gaining a shitload of sales!

[olsenn]

For what it's worth to the FLIR people reading, I would have not bought EITHER of my E4's if it was not for the hack, nor would I have bought any camera from you.  I was fine with my i7, but the hack made it too good to pass up, so I've bought two.

Please consider the popularity of this camera due to the hackability, as well as the fact that none of us would have bought an E8 (most of us would not have bought an E4 either), if it were not for this hack.  You are not losing money, you are gaining a shitload of sales!

I'll second that; I had no intention on purchasing a thermal imager prior to reading about this hack.

FLIR, what you really should consider, is that the type of people who were going to purchase an E8, still will purchase the E8. These are people who are spending other people's money to buy it! Big corporations that have inspection requirements; they will not risk breaking the law over a few thousand dollars, nor do they care about charging the company more money for the legitimate product. Don't officially encourage this hack, but don't actively counteract it either. Just enjoy your E4 sales... every retailer is out of stock -- this publicity is working in your favour!

[amyk]

Here's a special logo image you might want to use

[Taucher]

Huh. Windows 7 doesn't have a CRC01 function built in.

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'CRC01' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.

take a closer look inside e4hack3b.zip 

[Uup]

Has anyone ordered/bought Flir E4 from Australia ? or any ausi source?

I bought mine from www.instrumentcatalog.com.au for about $1350+gst. They also have a lowest price guarantee, if you find it cheaper after purchasing.

They had them in stock; bought on Wednesday and received it on Friday (Adelaide to Sydney). Haven't had time to upgrade mine yet but will do so early next week.

[Taucher]

Well.

... did you find crc01.exe inside the archive?

[Pinkus]

Don't know where you got a Beta2 (it's still 1)  ... but you're welcome

Well, you are hacking the E4 ..... I hacked your computer.

[Pinkus]

noooooo - just kiddin'
It was just a typo

[mikeselectricstuff]

... and I'll probably declare the menu Beta1 an useable state and leave it at beta1 - at least for some time now.

I've added a link form the start of the thread - once a few people have had a chance to test I'll do an install/uninstall script for easy installation.
BTW everything seems to work with no mods to my e8.cfg file.
I must get round to looking at the startup boot text to see if anything useful is saying "not adding item due to caps"

 

[mikeselectricstuff]

Some minor issues with menu hack

when menu opened, SD card and wireless icons appear alongside battery  neither is useful

Is Temp scale->unlock useful? seems the same functionality can be had by switching to auto or manual modes

Rainbow high contrast palette seems to be same as white hot

I've had it lock up a couple of times while scrolling around palette menu  - after to cold restart by long button press I got an "application error" popup window onscreen during boot. Removing battery seems to fix.

Could this be a missing pallette file  or menu error for Rainbow High contrast?

What I currently have on the E4 is arctic,iron,lava,rainbow and rainHC,.

Also noticed that if I select RainbowHC and exit (when it doesn't hang), on re-entry to colour menu it shows palette as Interval, so I think something may be wrong with the RainbowHC option

I think your latest zip also omits the rainHC.pal file - I have it on my E4 but wasn't on the original files I backed up a while ago so not sure where it came from - maybe an earlier version of the menu hack zip?

[mikeselectricstuff]

I note the comments directed at FLIR company readers.

There may be a sting the tail of this story though.

No inside information, but has anyone considered that FLIR may actually be making a LOSS on each sale of an E4 ? It may sound crazy but it is a valid business plan if you have other products offsetting the predicted loss, and you gain market dominance through the loss making product.  Other products (not FLIR) have also been deliberately sold at a loss to squeeze out the competition.

If this is the case, the E4 sales will have been a major success but would also potentially have caused a deviation in the monthly predicted loss figure for the model against which not enough of the products making a profit will have been sold to offset the loss.

I am no accountant, but I know they wield a lot of power in companies. Lets hope they are happy with the situation.

I can't really see it being the case here - it's not like someone buying an E4 is in any way locked in and likely to produce future sales. Obviously the margin is a lot lower on the E4, and your chat with PASS indicates that dealer margins are also tight, but considering that TICs around this price and resolution (with higher res sensors) have been around a while, the price isn't so low as to be anywhere near implausible.
The detector is clearly a shared development from automotive applications, and probably also night-vision/consumer gun sights where size and weight are important.
We've seen that they have clearly leveraged a large proportion of the dev costs from earlier models, so most of the unique dev costs on the E series are PCB etc. and case mouldings.
..and if their aim is to gain market share by undercutting the competition, they've clearly succeeded way more (or at least faster) than they could have hoped for. The Fluke visible thermometer products looked pretty poor value when they came out, and are now just dead ducks until they slash the price substantially.

Probably a poor example but British Leyland lost money on every Mini they sold !

I think that one was down to cockup rather than conspiricy.

[Psi]

heh, i arrive back in NZ after doing xray machine repairs in Australia for a week and get all nice and comfy on the sofa in front of projector, ready to catch up on TV shows i missed.
But instead i spend 2+ hours reading the 20+ of extra pages in this thread.
Sigh.

I'm still yoyo'ing between being ready to order an E4 vs putting the money towards saving for a house.
Part of me thinks the thermal camera market will be getting cheaper in the next 5 years and i'd be better waiting. It really would be a awesome toy/tool, but like others have said it would sit on the shelf most of the time.

[mikeselectricstuff]

I found the issue with the rainbow high-contrast - I noticed  a comment in the XML about lower case - my file was named rainHC.pal - renaming to rainhc.pal has fixed it.
I think either I didn't re-copy the palette files for the latest version, or my FTP client didn't distinguish case.

However I have again managed to repeat the crash by moving around the palette menu - as the menu is quite sluggish it could be something silly like an input queue overflow.

A new feature I did notice - now that the colour menu is so long it's a bit tedious clicking through it, but if you press & hold the left/right, it goes direct to the first/last item

[SeanB]

Buy the E4 and then you can inspect the prospective houses and be more informed.

[Psi]

Buy the E4 and then you can inspect the prospective houses and be more informed.

chicken and egg

I also quite like the cold, so finding where heat is escaping isn't a compelling reason

Actually, i should elaborate. I like being warm in the cold   nice warm bed with cold air all around.

[digsys]

I'm still yoyo'ing between being ready to order an E4 vs putting the money towards saving for a house.   

OR you can take your FLIR with you when looking for houses to reveal faulty insulation / wiring / heating / cooling systems
AND POTENTIALLY  save you 10s of 1000s of $$  Looks good now doesn't it?

Part of me thinks the thermal camera market will be getting cheaper in the next 5 years and i'd be better waiting. It really would be a awesome toy/tool, but like others have said it would sit on the shelf most of the time. 

I can't see them dropping much as the "professional" market will always be far larger than the piddly numbers happening here,
plus there's a risk that all future models will be hack-proof !!!! eeep

[mikeselectricstuff]

Part of me thinks the thermal camera market will be getting cheaper in the next 5 years and i'd be better waiting. It really would be a awesome toy/tool, but like others have said it would sit on the shelf most of the time. 

I can't see them dropping much as the "professional" market will always be far larger than the piddly numbers happening here,
plus there's a risk that all future models will be hack-proof !!!! eeep

It is inevitable that the price of 320x240 cams will drop significantly at some point as lower-res cams have been using 320x240 sensors for a while - just a case of who jumps first - as there is at least one Chinese manufacturer of sensors I'm surprised it hasn't happened already. Flir is heavily targetting new low-end markets in electrical and building with teh E series, so it's only a matter of time before others realise there's volume to be had here.

[Psi]

I can't see them dropping much as the "professional" market will always be far larger than the piddly numbers happening here,
plus there's a risk that all future models will be hack-proof !!!! eeep

I very much doubt Flir will bring out a ~$400  ~320x240 TIC,  but we might see china ones.

I'm sure they will update the firmware to try and stop the hack eventually, probably for legal reasons more than anything else, but my guess is we probably wont see those units in the wild for a few months, maybe longer.

I suspect their attitude is more... "hehe, we're going to have to fix that"  rather than a blind panic to get a new firmware out

[mikeselectricstuff]

Something interesting in Rainbow High contrast mode - you can see a few pixels gradually drifting which then disappear when it calibrates. These can be seen quite easily by setting manual temp span to minimum and slowly panning around an out of focus scene - you see them at the transitions, and to a lesser extent as a fixed pattern over the image.You can also see them with the lens cap shut.

This gradually increases towards the end of the cal period - incidentally I think it adjusts the cal interval based on rate of change of ambient, as it definitely slows down a few mins after powerup.

[Mark_O]

The USB ID's for the various modes:

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RNDIS and UVC        : 09cb:1005
...
RNDIS, UVC and MSD   : 09cb:1005


So, how does that work?

That are just USB ID's in case somebody wants to investigate into the USB stack
UVC will add a windows direct show imaging device (Video Capture)
MSD will add a Mass Storage Device - like a USB stick
RNDIS will provide a Network interface

Combinations of those modes will provide a combined device with subdevices

Note: the mode where all three are together does NOT work reliably - known limitation/failure

Thanks, Taucher.  I was aware of the abbreviations, but I'm sure that will be helpful for others. 

The point I was trying to make (evidently too obliquely ) was that the PIDs on those 2 USB IDS are the same, though the protocols enabled are different.  I wasn't sure if one was a typo or what.

[Mark_O]

Even the E4 isn't a cheap product - but I can guarantee that nobody here was going to buy an E8 ... and from what I count there were already 50+ E4 sold...

That's true.  However, I would not be at all surprised to find that there's someone in Sales over at Flir telling management that "Those guys over in that hacking forum just cost us over a quarter-Million USD in profits in the last 2 weeks alone".   

The fact that that is completely false doesn't change the situation that different folks see things in different ways, and for some, that will be their perception.