Flir E4 Thermal imaging camera teardown

[tjb1]

I hope SEEK Thermal are suitably impressed with the excellent work that is being done on thsi forum.

Yep, probably now they now how to NOT design thermal dongles, but do not care too much about this forum, because their target customers are not electronic guys who can hack their circuits and writ eown better software, but gadget fans, who will be able now make thermal blob of their cats, dogs, etc and will have another good reasons to chat on facebook etc. about this 

BTW: Gadget fans have no idea what gradient means at all and it doesn't matter that for the moment difficult to find thermal image from this Sick Thermal cam without destruction in the corners-they are happy thay can in restaurant now check which caffe cup is hot and go at night throutgh park with this dongle in hand saying and showing that now someone behind the trees can not only steel crappy phone worth $200 but additionally Sick Thermal dogle as a bonus  which is in their hands

And now he is over here "SEEK SO MUCH BETTER THAN FLIR    "  Change your mind quite a bit don't you?

[gemrough]

He's just a troll that thinks he's  but is just a    doing nothing but making just trying to pick a  and get others to  so he can 

how  we just need to  and he will go away

[eneuro]

SEEK SO MUCH BETTER THAN FLIR

This is Flir's One great MSX technology where bad processed visual image (probably due to limited processing power in this iPhone toy) simply destroys his blured 80x60 thermal image and for $385 or more happy Flir's customers gets a garbage of IR & visual image


They probably know this is a toy only while Flir One price now is not $350 , but  $250 , but with it's manual crappy shutter no worth even $100 while it is useless since we can't leave this device for longer time and record in automatic mode hours of thermal imaginery without human interaction
FLIR ONE - Infrared Accessory - fits Apple iPhone 5/5s - See the Heat - (Space Gray)

BTW: Santa Claus brings me Seek Thermal dongle, so no reasons to complain 

[tjb1]

SEEK SO MUCH BETTER THAN FLIR

This is Flir's One great MSX technology where bad processed visual image (probably due to limited processing power in this iPhone toy) simply destroys his blured 80x60 thermal image and for $385 or more happy Flir's customers gets a garbage of IR & visual image


They probably know this is a toy only while Flir One price now is not $350 , but  $250 , but with it's manual crappy shutter no worth even $100 while it is useless since we can't leave this device for longer time and record in automatic mode hours of thermal imaginery without human interaction
FLIR ONE - Infrared Accessory - fits Apple iPhone 5/5s - See the Heat - (Space Gray)

BTW: Santa Claus brings me Seek Thermal dongle, so no reasons to complain 

I'm sure your native language is not English but I give up trying to deciper whatever your point may be, and this is the Flir E4 thread...not Flir One. 

[Bud]

The language thing was unnecessary, tonns of precious information posted by non native english speaking members. Would this Blog have such success if only participants from Australia were allowed to post.

[eneuro]

Flir is not needed to see and record in realtime thermal image -a few lines of code with Seek dongle can do what we want, not what Flir wants 

this is not true
see my post
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/flir-e4-thermal-imaging-camera-teardown/msg377140/#msg377140

the flir raw video format is *.seq and can simple decoded with exiftool

@tomas123 With the point is that with a few lines of code I can do whatever I want with Seek Thermal thermal scene frames and Flir equipment is not needed, so sentence I've wrote:

"Flir is not needed to see and record in realtime thermal image"

now with Seek Thermal dongle is true.
I do not need any Flir's tools to make analysis of thermal image and more... I can do it in realtime on small ARM Linux PCB which... can controll GPIOs to do many automated tasks like for example in security system fire flush lights and enable high resolution full HD visual camera recording when detects suspicious objects in the scene, can move thermal camera and follow this thermal object...endless possibilities and Flir proprietary software or closed source software is not needed for such tasks 

[tjb1]

The language thing was unnecessary, tonns of precious information posted by non native english speaking members. Would this Blog have such success if only participants from Australia were allowed to post.

Well Australia speaks english...as does the US, Europe and a large portion of the world.  I've noticed random mispellings, he is capable of english but too busy trying to be a troll to put it all together.

[gemrough]

best thing to do is ignore him and he will go away. He is a child who still believes in Santa Claus

BTW: Santa Claus brings me Seek Thermal dongle, so no reasons to complain 

[Simon]

Yes I'm talking about the app. Also I'm not sure what you are talking about solving anything since the code I released doesn't show that gradient and I did share how I did it with source code a long time ago and I still have to see any algorithm from you.

In next posts like this Since the ring is not centered it could be due to the lens placement and the software assumes the ring is supposed to be centered it looks like you have a lot of to do to do it without manual tweaking for every Seek Thermal camera 
Just investigating nonlinear gradients in Flir E? 320x240 in similar spots too-need more 16bit gray PNGs from Flir equipment , before they make thermal blobs enhanced by MSX contours

If you have such a "thing" for seek please start your own topic on it.

[stefbeer]

I live by the principle "don't feed the trolls". Maybe others should too.

Back to the main reason why I'm posting here:
After about three hours of fiddling around and still not getting it to work I am slowly going nuts. Maybe someone can help me or can point me to the obvious mistake I'm doing over and over again.
I am trying to set the parameter ".image.services.store.quality" to "100".

Jpeg compression level:
.image.services.store.quality                       85

How would one go permanently changing this to 100? (I am never going to have 500 images on this thing so they may as well look as good as they can)

Enable RNDIS and telnet to it (192.168.0.2). Then do:

Code: [Select]

rset .image.services.store.quality 100
[...]

This works fine, but is only temporary of course. So I'm trying to make that permanent.

At first I tried to make my own quality.rsc and move it to \FlashFS\system :

Code: [Select]

#
# Created at 2014-11-25 16:07:00 by stefbeer
#
.image entry
.image.services entry
.image.services.store entry
.image.services.store.quality int32 100
# CRC32 dd781eefAfter a reboot the value still was at 85.

I thougt maybe the file doesen't get parsed because it's a new file. So I inserted the line into \FlashFS\system\default.rsc , re-calculated the CRC32, rebooted and failed again.
Then I tried a different approach and tried it as described here, but still no success.
So I moved my file quality.rsc over to \FlashFS\system\appcore.d\factory.d. (As you may notice, I don't really know where the file really belongs.) And, you already guessed it: nothing changed. I am slowly starting to get desperate.

After parsing through every text file on the system I noticed something in my e8.cfg (The one from the hack, of course) :

Code: [Select]

[...]
.caps.config.image.services entry
.caps.config.image.services.store entry
.caps.config.image.services.store.enabled bool true
.caps.config.image.services.store.radiometric entry
.caps.config.image.services.store.radiometric.enabled bool true
.caps.config.image.services.store.incompatible entry
.caps.config.image.services.store.incompatible.enabled bool false
.caps.config.image.services.store.incompatible.level int32 0
[...]Looks like just the place for my parameter. So I added the line:

Code: [Select]

.caps.config.image.services.store.quality int32 100I re-calculated the CRC01 of course, uploaded it via FTP and did a reboot. My hopes were so high but I failed yet again. Nothing changed, the parameter still is at 85. (But the resolution still was at 320x240 and the MSX still worked, which means the new e8.cfg has to be valid.) I only got a headace and the tiniest bit frustrated.

Oh and I'm still on firmware version 1.19.8.

Any kind of help is highly appreciated! Thanks in advance!

[skynet]

hi all ive just got a Flir E4 1.2L  software ver 2.3.0 can someone point me in the right place for a how to , to do the hack and software files needed thanks 

[Bud]

Stefbeer, may be it is expecting the parameter after int32 in a particular format, i.e. hex. Try searching the files to see how numeric parameters are formatted.

[nissepisse]

hi all ive just got a Flir E4 1.2L  software ver 2.3.0 can someone point me in the right place for a how to , to do the hack and software files needed thanks 

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/flir-e4-thermal-imaging-camera-teardown/

Have you tried to read the first post in the thread?

[stefbeer]

@ Bud:
Thank you for your reply! But that doesen't seem to be the problem. I checked different configuration and ressource files and the value seems to be "plain numbers" for an int32.

For example \FlashFS\system\default.rsc:

Code: [Select]

.image.services.store.bgStoreDelay int32 100
[...]
.image.sysimgInstances.main.measureFuncs.mbox.1.calcMask int32 12
[...]
.power.settings.acOffTime int32 1140
.power.settings.acSysIdleTime int32 55
.power.settings.acUserIdleTime int32 5
.power.settings.battOffTime int32 1140
.power.settings.battSysIdleTime int32 55
.power.settings.battUserIdleTime int32 5
[...]
.system.usbforcefs int32 0
And \FlashFS\system\appcore.d\config.d\e8.cfg:

Code: [Select]

.caps.config.image.services.store.incompatible.level int32 0
[...]
.caps.config.image.settings.IRwidth int32 320
.caps.config.image.settings.IRheight int32 240
[...]
.caps.config.image.sysimg.alarms.measfunc.maxCount int32 3
[...]
.caps.config.image.sysimg.alarms.humidity.maxCount int32 1
[...]
.caps.config.image.sysimg.alarms.insulation.maxCount int32 1
[...]
More ideas?

[Bud]

Did you try looking in the WEB interface? I think i saw something storage related there but can only check when i get home tonight.

[eneuro]

If you have such a "thing" for seek please start your own topic on it.

Probably not needed, while thanks to a few people from this thread very quickly discovered tricks how  Flir manipulates thermal LUTs on their equipment (FLIR E4+) to display thermal scenes with objects  above its maximum temperature and now postprocessing even Flir's 16bit PNGs in custom open source software is not a problem.


BTW: I hope, this is not Flir's fanclub page, but teardown thread, so there are people which are looking for hardware details and others are very interested in how Flir deals with image processing in their products.

Thanks to those threads and teardowns on EEVblog - people can choose product which better fits their project requirements

[pomonabill221]

Just a thought... does the value for quality go to 100?  I mean is the number 100 even recognized as a valid number?
Maybe try 99 and see it that works?

Just a thought....

[pomonabill221]

A crude way... try searching for the partial string... store.quality 100.
Just wonder if it's hiding somewhere else that might have been overlooked?

[stefbeer]

@ Bud:
I did now but I couldn't find anything I always get sweatty hands when I click through all those calibration menus. After I went through all of them I looked at the screen of the TIC, only to see some weird noise overlayed over the picture. My heart started beating faster but everything is back to normal after a power cycle (of the TIC, not my heart! ). But still no permanent quality setting...


@ pomonabill221:
Yes, you can set the JPEG quality parameter to 100. If I do:

Code: [Select]

rset .image.services.store.quality 100it works just as it should.

When I export the whole resource tree with

Code: [Select]

rls -r -l > /FlashIFS/rls.txtI can see the current value and the min and max value:

Code: [Select]

.image.services.store: (32)
[...]
rw--rw--rw--1- 0 root   root   <i> quality                      100
                 [1, 100]
[...]
I really don't understand why I can set the value with rset without an issue but I'm not able to set it via a config or resource file...

A search with the partial string came up with a few results, see attached screenshot. Previously I alwas searched with the leading dot. I think that is what Bud meant, but as far as I can see the function call is also just temporary and only called during certain calibration functions (which I ain't touchin'!).

[pomonabill221]

hhmmm.... I see a few places where the quality is 85, but I wouldn't have the guts to start playing around with some of them either.
Of course, the Ex's don't have a laser, so those entries shouldn't do anything.

I have VERY limited "exploratory" experience with the Ex, so my help would be limited, but these things I posted are just thoughts that I had....
I would imagine that this parameter is one of them though... just which one?!?!?!

[TurboTom]

Cheers guys&gals -

I don't know if FLIR ever provided any for download but I'm looking for an original update package to firmware version 1.19.8. Since only the most recent version is available on the update server, I thought some forum member may still have a copy of the old version in his archives and might possibly share it... . This would open the road for me to some more experimenting...

Thanks and all the best,

Thomas

[OrBy]

I don't know if FLIR ever provided any for download but I'm looking for an original update package to firmware version 1.19.8.

I don't recall 1.19.8 ever being released for download - only found factory installed. FLIR did have a 1.18.7 update pack but then it jumped to 1.21.0.

Also remember that there are three (or more) hardware versions as well - 1.0, 1.1 (power supply fix?), and 1.1L (hack lock down?). I am not sure if 1.0's can go above 1.18.7 without risking a brick as I recall FLIR asking 1.0's to be sent in to be upgraded to 1.21.0.

[sofisticated]

Cheers guys&gals -

I don't know if FLIR ever provided any for download but I'm looking for an original update package to firmware version 1.19.8. Since only the most recent version is available on the update server, I thought some forum member may still have a copy of the old version in his archives and might possibly share it... . This would open the road for me to some more experimenting...

Thanks and all the best,

Thomas

Thomas

I have fw 1.18.7 package. Maybe it works for you. I send it over Wetransfer. here is the link
"https://www.wetransfer.com/downloads/edc64ec8258772c435577410b990cc8520141126075443/8ede047ffd9b47a7a195b3b5b1b2efa320141126075443/d9d99b"

If link is not working please inform, I can try another service.
Tugbay

[skynet]

ive followed all the how to for a Flir E4 (Firmware 2.3.0) i am stuck in rndis mode i can see ftp and all files tryed to install v04.zip hack via python also the v03.zip just incase i get errors my flir ip is right its on the screen on windows xp

[janekivi]

1.18.7 version link was somewhere here too. You can play with it in 2.3.0 camera, if you use from it let's say
appcore exe and dll and common dll, for testing rls.exe too. Then you can see it reads plain text conf files.
But how this registry or whatever that thing is - .caps.config and so on, working and why conf needed for
every boot. If there is a way to save settings for default...