ICI T-Cam 600 P-Series Thermal Camera

[basecase]

I visited ICI's booth at a trade show awhile ago and was vaguely aware of the products they offer, but the last thing I expected was finding multiples of these cameras for sale on eBay at steep discounts. I ended up buying one functional and one for-part unit (boot but no image) that still had all accessories. I half expected to find a blown out part in the broken camera, but half way into the disassembly the thing started working again. What. Might as well complete the disassembly to inspect the rest of the camera and do a write-up at this point. It's interesting that the broken camera was running an older software version which had a cloud storage feature that was absent in the newer version.

Here's the link to the disassembly gallery.
Alternate link.

The T-Cam 600 P is essentially a rebadged Infiray Tianxuan M600. Softwares and manuals are pretty much the same for both though I liked Infiray IR Discovery's ease of use over ICI IRFlashPro's. Interestingly enough ICI's phone app for the camera is on the Apple App Store while Infiray's app is available for Android as an .apk file. I will need to find a sacrificial phone to test this app out later, but for the most parts the camera works well enough as-is in both stand-alone and as webcam/streaming device over USB. I've been using these to record stuffs at work, and I am quite happy that they produced better images/videos than my Seek Thermal cameras ever could.

That said, I have some problems with these:
1. I couldn't find a simple way to remove the manual focus ring. This part is apparently separately from the lenses holder and is secured by something not quite visible. I have a suspicion that the lenses will have to be removed to get to the screws, but I don't really have access to a dust-free environment to confidently disassemble/reassemble this.

2. The core/lenses/manual focus ring on both cameras are somehow misaligned with the opening of the case. This is a problem since I do want to design a lenses holder for the ZnSe macro lenses I got for my old cameras. There didn't seem to be any opening mark on the functional camera, so I think this was a mistake from the original design.

3. The h264 videos recorded by the cameras would play nicely on the device, but on PC I get frames skipping and generally a hard time re-encoding the videos to reduce size. Likely will need to do some more research on proper codec settings, but for the time streaming the cameras' output over USB and then record that is probably the better approach.

[basecase]

After playing around with the cameras a bit more, it looked like firmware v2.1.5 on the repaired camera from 2021 couldn't recognize microSD card formats other than FAT32 while v3.0.0 can do exFAT. Windows didn't give me the option to format microSD cards with capacities higher than 32GB to FAT32, so I ended up using FAT32Format v1.01 to get a 128GB microSD card recognized. Still, 32GB would have been plenty of storage as 30-40 minutes of continuous recording (i.e., holding down the trigger) would only take up about 1GB of space on v2.1.5, and individual visible+IR images combined would take up about 2MB total. v3.0.0 on the functional camera produced videos that are significantly larger in size which made me think that there might be hardware and/or video-processing differences between the units. For starter, v3.0.0 camera finished booting a few seconds faster, had less motion blur on moving objects (could also be higher refresh rate on the screen), and overall was more responsive when taking/saving images. I'll probably tear down the v3.0.0 camera at some point later, but probably only after I decided on whether I should send the thing to ICI for firmware upgrade to v3.0.2. Per Infiray, the M600 firmware isn't compatible with the T-Cam, so that leaves ICI the sole source to get updates. I reached out to ICI to see if they would service/calibration check the camera, and it looked like they'll do it for $495 + ship + tax at minimum.

Videos for comparison:    
Focus was adjusted to get the sharpest image in each case.

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After installing the Infiray IR Discovery Android app, the app could connect to the camera just fine after the phone connected to the camera's Wifi network. In terms of functionality the app could transfer images from the camera's microSD card over to the phone for analysis, but that seemed to be about it. I thought there would be video streaming functionality like the IR Discovery software on PC, but that was not supported I guess. On the bright side I realized that the PC software allows for recording of radiometric data up to 20FPS which is nice for when I want to do more serious analysis for work.

[Garry2]

Did ICI say what the charge is to update the firmware? I have two of these as well with v2.1.5 and v3 does look like an upgrade. I tried reaching out to them for support on getting IRFlashPro to recognize the cameras but they stopped responding when they asked where the cameras were purchased. Had a nice chat with the owner anyway about thermal imagers. 

[basecase]

I got a bit further than you did. Got quoted $495 + shipping for each unit just to get the camera on the servicing technician's bench. Servicing work involved checking the state of the (likely) Panasonic ML1220 battery for RTC in the unit along with potentially a calibration check/recalibration and firmware upgrade, so I guess it costs $495 minimum just to get the firmware. Latest firmware as of early May 2024 was v3.0.2. I don't think I'm missing out much considering the performance is still acceptable even for the older software, so I decided to keep the v2.1.5 as-is. Either version can do 20FPS streaming of radiometric data to the computer anyways. Other than that, I never had any luck with using ICI's IR Flash Pro. The whole report information setup before starting a session annoyed me greatly, so Infiray's IR Discovery gets to stay on my computer.

Since you have 2 of these, I'm guessing we bought from the same source on eBay. I asked the vendor what year of calibration the last unit's documentation stated, and when I got told it was 2021 I gave up on buying the last unit they had. At >$495 for service I was seriously considering another camera instead of upgrading the firmware, but I didn't want another v2.1.5.

Out of sheer curiosity, do your T-Cam 600s have slightly off-center manual focus lenses? Both of mine don't seem to align with the cutout.

[Garry2]

Both of mine are also inward at the 0.5-∞ print on the cover. I got them from the purpletech seller. I am wondering if the parts one was one that I returned. They sent me one that would boot to the ICI logo and then go to a blank screen. I am so far happy with them. They seem to be a big upgrade over my modified e30. I am curious where these originally came from. Once I saw the last one they had in stock drop to $330 I picked it up. My biggest complaint is that the laser on both units does line up with the thermal image center, close or at a distance. Looking at your photos they have it glued so adjustment may not be easy. I did like how Flir used the visible camera to show on the screen where the laser was. My units also do not seem to keep time once the battery is removed. I am guessing than the RTC battery is drained. Did you happen to measure yours? I have a black body from one of the fever cams and the measurement on these is very close to the displayed value so I feel the calibration is still good.

[Garry2]

Also I was able to find some additional teardown photos from the fcc report of the iray version. It looks like the pulled the core apart. https://device.report/m/7719ec2bd56e6f03112a925f413c65f19babb0fc93435d6351b43f2a0f0793d0.pdf

[basecase]

Thank you for the FCC document. The version shown has a pretty nice-looking metalized(?) internal plastic surface. Also, it looked like the core had to be taken out for the manual focus ring to be removed.

I think the camera you returned ended up being auctioned by the seller since my V2.1.5 had the same symptom with booting that you described. Also, given the quantity this seller had, they might have gotten these cameras from a liquidated inspection service/equipment rental company. My V2.1.5 unit came with user information of the previously logged in account for the Infiray cloud service which was interesting. I didn't have the password to access the uploaded data, so I ended up resetting the unit to factory defaults. I think there's a possibility that these cameras were liquidated due to the cloud storage functionality not working anymore (v3 firmware Infiray provided to ICI no longer have cloud storage in the Settings menu), and that firmware update by ICI would be cost-prohibitive or overall not possible for whoever was using/renting these out.

The price drops were pretty interesting for the original camera listing. I think I saw this seller putting up the cameras at around $1200-1500 each last year. I had it in my Watch List for awhile, but I didn't notice the price drop to $450 until around April or so this year after I started looking into what other ICI stuffs were on eBay. Honestly after looking up the camera's specifications, the listing made me think it was a bit too good to be true, and I'm quite glad that the deal ended up working out very well considering I got one of the few/only(?) v3 firmware ones up for sale. Another added benefit was that these 600P's replaced much of my camera collection, so I was able to to effectively downsize to basically these two plus a ISG Elite XRHR which overall took up a lot less storage space.

Regarding the hardware, I noticed that the laser pointers on both of my units were off-center compared their respective thermal sensors and with one another. I guess there's a lot of deviations between units due to the way the laser pointer was glued onto the frame. That said, I think there is enough space to have both an external laser pointer and a lens holder occupying the same piece of accessory that would clip onto the front of the camera.

Other than that, the RTC battery on my v2.1.5 was definitely dead while the one in the v3 managed to keep the time for at least an hour after the main battery was removed. I wonder if this dead battery somehow caused the v2.1.5 camera to be sluggish, so I'll probably buy a replacement next time I order from Digikey. Lastly, I checked the calibration of both cameras against a ICI Temperature Reference Source 101 set at 50C and 90C, and the measured temperatures were pretty much within specifications from ~1m away.

[Garry2]

I will have to tear into at least one of these to check the battery. I also found that if you go to device info in settings and then rapidly click on version you get a prompt for a factory password. At least on v2.1.5, not sure if v3 is different. I tried variations of the serial number, ICI, their domain, Infiray, ect with no luck. Would be interesting to see what's inside the service menu.

[basecase]

I can confirm that the factory password prompt also exists in v3. I have a gut feeling that the password might be somehow tied to the current device date and possibly together with the serial number of the device itself. Could be DD x MM x YY + Last 4 digits of the S/N for example so that the password isn't static and has to be stored somewhere.