I am able to connect to it with the utility.
Here is what happens. Upon powerup the camera image looks like a rave party. It's wildly flashing/varying up and down the gain spectrum. The image itself is decent, it's just the brightness and intensity that are out of control. Calibration and what not appear to be way out of order. Once I do a reset command it settles down and works normally. However, if I save the now reset parameters it does not retain them and does the same thing again the next time it powers up.
Physically, I found that a tiny ribbon cable with a bit of woven tape at the end fell out when the back board was removed. I assume this is a thermistor that contacts the FPGA as it seemed to just lay against it once the back board was in place. I noticed the little plastic retaining clip was broken and when I tried to see if I could get it back in place with some tweezers it launched into orbit somewhere never to be seen again. I placed the ribbon into the connector the best I could and held it in place with a little dab of hot glue.
Could a bad thermistor cause it to lose track of the thermal state its in and act this way? Also, the diagnostics in the GUI show the current temperature to off. It is indicating 41 degrees F when it's actually about 73 F ambient in the room it's in.
Here are some more values it reports in advanced controller GUI mode:
Filter Gain: 0
Filter Control: 0
Spatial Control: 17
Plateau Value: 150
ITT Mean: 127
Max Gain: 8
AGC Filter: 64
Dynamic DDE: 17
ACE Threshold: 0
Information Threshold: 100
Gain Switch Values
Hi-Low Thresh: 140 C
High-Low POP: 20%
How-Hi Thresh: 100 C
Low-High POP: 95%
Spot Meter Temperature -437 F The camera shows to be a Tau 2.4 (640x512) Part# 46640019H-FPNLX
It has a very nice motorized large autofocus lens attached which gives a beautiful image once its stabilized (reset) and working normally.
I suppose I could code up an Arduino Nano or similar to fire off a reset command each time it boots but was hoping to find a more legitimate fix.