Hyper-Spectral,
I will be documenting my ‘journey’ with this camera in a new thread. I have read the various user and technical manuals that come with it and I am about to embark on the voyage of discovery that will hopefully enable me to get the best out of this amazing piece of equipment.
If I am honest, I am still getting used to the whole idea of owning such an advanced thermal camera. It is more sophisticated than any that I have used previously as it offers so much control over the image capture and processing stages. As I have previously stated, this is a scientific piece of equipment as opposed to a semi-pro or even pro thermal camera. It has a totally different ‘feel’ to it and the menu’s are a little daunting when first viewed. I thought I was very lucky to own a FLIR A40 and SC3000 static cameras. This SC4000 is not the sort of thermal camera I ever expected to own or have the opportunity to buy .... it is all a little surreal to be honest.
The SC4000/6000 series were developed by FLIR-Indigo for use on US Military weapons ranges but they were permitted to sell them to certain approved customers as well. Hence the tight controls on both the camera hardware and even the highly detailed user and technical manuals. These cameras cost in the range of $85K to $140K
I am pleased that this camera contains a linear Stirling Cooler unit. These have been carefully developed to ensure a long and reliable operational life. The life is stated as >10,000 hours but testing showed them to last more than 250,000 hours ! FLIR cannot guarantee that of course. The down side of the linear cooler is its size, weight and current consumption. Hence why the SC4000 weighs around 10lb and is basically a ‘box’ shape to accommodate the bulky cooler and the PCB’s are mounted around it. The unit draws up to 4A at 24V so it is not exactly environmentally friendly in the power consumption department
I only care about operational life though so these drawbacks are of no concern. The linear cooler primary piston housing also has the advantage of no wires entering through the sealed casing for a rotary type motor. Such feed-thru connection seals are known to sometimes leak, causing loss of the Helium fill. The piston drive is magnetic with the drive coils surrounding the primary piston cylinder and the piston contains a strong permanent magnet. The piston is attached to a precision spring and operated at resonance by the driver circuit.
I own the x15 microscope lens assembly from an AGA Thermovision 680 MWIR thermal microscope. It will be interesting to see whether I can adapt that lens assembly to work with the SC4000
I will also be looking at making some bayonet mount spacer rings for close focus work using the standard 25mm and 50mm lenses. There may even be a photographic bayonet mount that can be adapted. We shall see. My Inframetrics Close-up lenses are dual band so I can also use them with this MWIR camera.
So the next steps for me now will be to create a nice stable laptop running XP and installed with Pleora iPort and the SC4000 GUI for configuration testing and changes. I will then install FLIR Researcher 2.8 SR3 that came with the camera. That should work perfectly as the camera is specifically configured to work with Researcher 2.8 without any tweaking needed. If all goes well I will move the testing onto ResearchIR 4 MAX running on a Win7 platform. ResearchIR 4 MAX is the latest R&D thermal analysis software from FLIR and it supports the SC4000 and 6000 series. Hopefully all will go to plan and I will be able to run the camera on either a WinXP Researcher 2.8 or Win7 ResearchIR 4 MAX platform
As I say, I will likely begin a new thread to document the background to the SC4000/6000 series and my experiences with it.
Fraser