Newbies Please Read
The upgrade of the E4 thermal camera has been a very popular topic on this forum and as a result this thread has grown to mammoth proportions. There has been a lot of discussion on how the E4 may be reconfigured and plently of other very useful information relating to the camera design and improvement.
There are several very clever people who have created the capability to upgrade the Ex series, both prior to, and after, FLIR tried to stop the upgrade path. Theses people have provided their time free of charge and have documented the process in the thread. The first page contains many links to directly access the required information.
As has been stated several times in this thread, the upgrade of Menus is for the experienceduser only and is NOT a simple operation for those unfamiliar with FTP transfer tools. It IS possible to brick your E4 if you get the process very wrong. Since FLIR released Firmware 1.21.0 and 1.22.0, the upgrade process has become more complicated as the user is effectively carrying out a hack againat an encryption countermeasure. Failure to get the 'hack' right appears to result in a camera that does not give the higher resolution and loses the MSX functionality. Panic not...... this appears to be a 'default' condition when an invalid configuration file is found. The correctly encrypted configuration and CRC is all that is needed to correct the situation. This issue and the process to correct it is contained in more recent Posts. Please read them.
Why are people getting annoyed when Newbies ask for help ? Well we were all newbies at one time or another but my view is as follows........ If given the opportunity to significantly upgrade a product for free due to the very hard work of very generous people, I would accept that I might have to 'pay' for that upgrade by carefully reading ALL available information prior to asking questions about the upgrade process or issues with such. I would also back-up all my files to prevent loss, and I would ensure that I was competetent to carry out the required tasks before attempting a hack. Failure to take these basic steps can lead to a pretty chilly response from forum members....that is just life. We are not unfriendly but many of us regularly receive requests to 'spoon feed' people with information on how to hack the E4 or other items that we have posted messages about.
I hope newbies can appreciate that this is not a personal attack when they ask for help but it does get a bit tiring to see the same "my hack went wrong" or "how do I do it" questions again and again, just adding to noise in thread.
May I make a suggestion.....those who are having trouble with the hack process should start a separate thread and effectively form a self-help group to aid eachother in the process. One of the more knowledgeable members of this thread MAY be willing to assist that group on a one-off basis and the process may then be documented in that groups thread for other Newbies to follow. This may avoid the upset that some newbies feel when they get a sharp response to a request for help ? Just a thought.
Also please be very aware that when the new countermeasure firmware was released by FLIR, some persons, including at least one member of this forum, chose to exploit the situation for financial gain. They took an upgrade process that was freely given to the wider community and sold upgraded FW 1.19.8 E4 cameras via e*ay for significant profit as the marketplace panicked when news of the FW 1.21.0 countermeasure became known. This action has been considered poor form by many members of this thread as no information was provided in the auctions stating that the upgrade was freely available on this forum, and no attibution was made to EEVBLOG or the creators of the upgrade. The sales may also have irritated FLIR more than woudl have been the case if the upgrade was being done for personal ise only.
It is known that some persons joining this forum have done so only in order to obtain help in upgrading E4 cameras so that they may sell them for profit on auction sites to persons without the knowledge to do the hack themselves, or who are not aware of the free nature of the hack process. Sadly this means that many Newbies will be treated with suspicion. Especially if you come from the Czech Republic !
Fraser (aka Aurora)