The price of these things has come down to where I found it irresistible. What ultimately made it irresistible, though, was that I could order it from the seller's web site without making yet another account.
https://industryrecycles.com/shop/seek-scan-thermal-body-imager-206-x-156-resolution-yw-aaa-2/Mine arrived Friday & gave me images "out of the box" on my own software...sort of--everything was either -40 or few hundred degrees F. It took me several hours to ferret out the problems & get reasonable output, but the result is sweet.
The first problem is that the frames of data that the camera spits out upon initialization are apparently only spit out on first init. after power up. If I shut down my program & then re-start without unplugging the camera & re-plugging it, my program just sits there timing out & giving errors.
The major problem for me is that the "frame 9", which I use as a thermistor lookup table, has the same range of values as the Pro dongles rather than what the non-pros have (the ones I have anyway). The new non-pros might now have that same data set too, for all I know. It took me a few hours to figure out how to handle this & still cover the old dongles, but now I have it "close enough" to get reasonable images out of the 'scan :~) I need to do some massaging to get the temperatures closer to correct, but it's working quite well now.
Other observations:
The data from the camera is 206 x 156 pixels but the bottom row is all 0's.
Whenever there is a shutter event the camera outputs frames with status byte 1, 6, & 20. Values in frames 1 & 6 are similar but values in frame 20 are more than twice as big.
Camera Type is reported as 3150 rather than "Compact", also:
Software version: 2.3.0.0
Image Processing Software: 2.11.3.2
Camera Hardware: HW: v0 TH: v5 TLID: -1
Camera Software: 3.8.1.24
I can only guess what caused the problems Fraser had with 3rd party software. One guess is that perhaps the other software is expecting certain return messages from the setup commands & not getting what is expected. I don't process any of those return messages so it won't matter to my software.
I don't have the SDK & don't use "zadig" or "winUSB", so I can't say if there are any issues with those. I use libUSB under Debian Linux & the only problems I had are the ones I stated above.
So the big news is that there are no special codes needed to get the Seek Scan to yield the usual temperature range, OR to get it to work at all--the same USB commands work for the (non-pro) Compacts & the SeekScan. There might be something that needs to be sent to make it work without unplugging the camera every time, but that is not catastrophic for my purposes. Further good news is that this problem does not appear to occur with the Seek phone app. I even force-stopped the app & opened it again & it worked without unplugging the camera.
HOWEVER, there is one disappointing thing with the phone app in that the TIFFs saved from the Scan contain scaled images, only 103x78 pixels, including the temperature data set. The images also are screwed up as shown.
Image in TIFF:
Corrected image:
Image on phone:
I intend to dig into the black body at some point, but for now I feel like I should just be happy with how well this works & do other stuff for a while.
Image from my software
I will attach a set of startup & shutter frames from the 'scan in case they are of help to anyone troubleshooting 3rd party software.