Thermal Camera purchasing - The perils of buying a cooled camera

[Fraser]

You are absolutely correct. I would not breach ITAR, BIS or Wassenaar dual use regulations.

The following document may be of interest to you though....

https://www.export.gov/article?id=China-U-S-Export-Controls

The issues around controlled dual use technology exports to China revolve mainly around military use and orders destined for military projects. Where civilian use is concerned, especially by individuals, the USA appears more relaxed. This is why it is not uncommon to find controlled US technology being used in China for non military applications. Some common sense is thankfully applied to requests from scientific institutions etc. Very capable microbolometers from ULIS are exported to China in order for then to be used in Chinese built thermal cameras. There are likely ‘in country’ checks on their use but it is mainly a paperwork exercise. Wuhan Guide were/are using ULIS microbolometers from France.

As you already have the required software to drive the imaging core you do not need FLIR’s help anyway. Your unit with only 50 hours run time sounds great 

Fraser

[cnxunuo]

Hi Fraser

I am aware that flir-china seems very, very, sometimes too relax about academic use of high frame rate thermal cameras in china for some reason (perhaps because sells people are Chinese and they fabricate export documents to save buyers time in order to get more sells), around 3 years ago I was a undergrad in china, we bought a camera which could be used in binning mode to achieve 1500fps, we used it to study micro fluid inside hydrogen fuel cell. we got the unit directly from flir china, without filling any export related documents, not even a end user agreement was needed, Flir representative in china just “take care of everything for us” when I asked since I was an thermal camera enthusiast since a schoolboy and . from digging for price information publicly before purchasing, I found out that at least one of the unit was purchased solely for ammunition study in one of the institute, I presume they didn't go thru any export with flir china....maybe this is why they got fined...

as for ULIS, since their mems structure isn't that shock proof, I dropped my thermapp 384 once or twice, and loads of new dead pixel appears, so gun sight and missle cant use them. VOx are much more resilient to shock from my own experience dropping photon and tau, cant observed any new dead pixel when dropped.

There is a VOx knockoff when I went to the Zhuhai air show in 2016, they were showing some of the sights which has noise patterns similar to Flir from my limited time (1-2sec) to see thru them, I was carrying a thermapp on my phone so everybody demonstrating their thermal camera became nervous when I pick up their display item and tried to kick me offsite...

Anyway I fully respect itar being a hobbyist, and 9hz is enough for me for most of the time . It seems, strangely, there's less thermal camera in UK ebay than in Chinese online markets. people in UK seems happy with their analog CCTV camera while many CCTV in china, 5% I guess, are thermal (from hikvision, don't know what core they use).

[Hydron]

I know for a fact that ULIS sensors are used for weapon sights (in addition to other military applications). I do not know anything about the packaging of the system or what they are mounted to though - maybe it is sufficiently protected that it handles shocks better than a consumer grade unit (remember that dropping stuff into hard surfaces can produce some pretty high forces!)

[tske]

It's 10 years since the OP posted, yet still no affordable cooled/MWIR cameras, not even second-hand ones

[ArsenioDev]

It's 10 years since the OP posted, yet still no affordable cooled/MWIR cameras, not even second-hand ones

I dunno, me and my crew have obtained a SXGA 12um pitch unit for 1500, two L3 NC2s (VGA) for $600 each and each FLIR 8500/7500 (QVGA) for $2000 each. Oh and a crashed Safire-380 (SXGA)
The difficulty is they are COMPLEX and difficult systems to deal with, and a bear and a half to get information about due to controls.
we do NOT recommend for people unfamiliar with the architecture and deep debug and RE.
Not worth for most people, we've spent WEEKS on debug and trying to nail down pain points, there's so many pain in the ass parts with the various vintages.
China has some COTS SLS cores with zoom lenses for about 35K.

[tske]

Yes that's another problem, most cooled cameras are not hobbyist-friendly, they require complex external hardware and software to run.

[nikitasius]

Could be great to get the cooled "freezer" like cooled camera 🤓
-21 -- 34°C is good enough for a hobby purposes guess.

W/ gas you can cool DIY to -27°C. I tried it on a non-cooling chinese type-C camera i had and sold it. Idk why they don't do that.

[KE5FX]

It seems possible to distill LN2 yourself with reasonably low effort and expense, although you'd probably prefer to scale it down further than this guy did. 

Medical oxygen concentrators may be a good source of some of the hardware, and they are far cheaper and more widely available in the post-COVID era than they were in 2015 when you (Fraser) started the thread.

[ArsenioDev]

It doesn't change the response of a microbolometer.
MWIR use direct photon conversion via photodiodes, not a bolometer pixel.
the III-V semicons in those bands don't have a great bandgap until they're cooled down, so won't even really work.
The other difficulty is removing the cryocooler without breaching the IDCA vacuum, don't really recommend trying to LN2 mod a MWIR.