I recently purchased a
UTi260B from Banggood, which marked my first order ever from Banggood. Thankfully it ships in a nice padded box because that box was shipped in a thin plastic bag with zero padding, and it arrived with small holes and rips, and the box corners were slightly smashed.
I ordered
the official Macro lens for it too, also from Banggood. Why they foolishly shipped the camera and the lens separately is anyone's guess, but they didn't charge me extra for shipping two separate packages. The
UT-Z002 macro lens ships in a plastic blister pack, and silly Banggood only puts that inside the same, unpadded plastic bag when shipping. It arrived in one piece thankfully, and works great to allow my 260B to get very close to a PCB.
Sadly, the official UT-Z002 macro lens covers the digital camera and only allows the thermal camera to view the device under test. I am also finding the temperature readings to be hotter when using the Macro lens, as compared to when not using it. And when I attach my 121GW's Type-K thermal probe to a hotspot, I see that the temperatures on the 260B without the macro lens attached are the most accurate. In other words, my 121GW with Type-K thermocouple's temperature measurements largely match the 260B WITHOUT the Macro lens attached. Yes, Emissivity settings matter, but that is not at the heart of the problem. The Macro lens just makes the readings about 10°C hotter, for reasons I don't understand. Other than that, the benefits of the Macro lens are great because you can finally get up close and see hotspots on even SMD components.
The cost of the official UT-Z002 Macro lens is much cheaper than other compatible Macro lenses that merely tape onto the 260B, such as those sold by
NorthridgeFix here. Prior to purchasing the official lens, I tried to ask NorthridgeFix what the functional differences are between theirs and the official one, but after waiting a week, they never gave me a reply, which is quite odd. My post to their form is still awaiting approval too, which is also odd.
The good news is my 260B is working fine so far. Seems very well made and is built to be rugged. It
firmware ver. 2.0.20 and the unit included a 32GB uSD card. While searching for firmware updates in vain today, I came across this thread and is why I decided to post this. It seems that if indeed there is newer
firmware, it's not online, nor is it clear how one would update it.
I must say
the official PC software for the 260B stinks. It doesn't do much at all, and while I was able to get it to work by downloading the latest
Parallels trial to run Windows on ARM on my M1 Max MacBook Pro, the official software won't run at all under WINE. Quite sad because WINE is free.
When running the official software, it's nice that there's a
video feed to the computer when you link the included USB-C cable between the 260B and the computer, but the only way I see to save the video is to make a screen recording. And that's it. The software doesn't allow you to do any of the important things it should, like saving a clean thermal image with no data overlay, changing the color palettes on the fly, etc. Why? Seriously... Why skip that? Ack!
I did find
this Github page with a Python script to extract clean images. I'm not well versed in Python usage though, so I'm not sure the best way to go about it.
For those of you who have tried that Python script or who otherwise are Python experts, what's the step by step approach to doing it on a Mac? Or could it be done online by moving the saved images to the computer and then uploading them?
Thanks.