Pleora iPort PT1000-IDG-LVDS Ethernet adapter for Flir Photon thermal camera

Description

Pleora (custom version for Indigo Systems / Flir) PT1000-IDG-LVDS-V2 Gigabit Ethernet adapter for Flir Photon thermal camera. It functions as breakout box - you can power the camera and get analog video from BNC connector, and through Ethernet you can send commands and get digital video with Photon GUI. Depending on your camera firmware/software version (pre 2008 / post 2008) you'll need to install Photon OEM GUI version 1.2 or 2.4. Pleora 2.2 Coyote software is included with GUI - install it too. In Digital Video tab of GUI you can change bit depth . Another important control: Auto-adjust display dynamic range. With this you can see your 14bit picture displayed properly. Not every capture program can do that. Pleora's Coyote streams video without errors - but display is dark grey - basically no picture. Latest eBUS Player can adjust dynamic range with histogram, but it is not compatible with this adapter firmware. I'm afraid there is no firmware update for this custom model. You can record single BMP or Tiff image - open it in Photoshop and click Auto Contrast if picture is grey/black. Also, you can record sequence of Tiffs as one. Enter number of images to be recorded - click Capture Now - it will save them to RAM - after that you can save pictures to disk. This one multi Tiff can be opened and played as video in ImageJ - it will also automatically auto adjust dynamic range. According to Flir literature - these adapters can be used with other parallel cameras like Merlin and Phoenix. But, firstly, these cameras are RS422 and this adapter is LVDS - you would need an earlier RS422 grabber version. Secondly, some chips are removed in order to provide power to / and analog video from Photon camera. Do not connect iPort pins 31, 33 (Photon 12v power) to your 16-bit camera! Grabber to camera cable is included, as well as power supply (this too has different pinout - if you use power adapter from standard Pleora adapter - it will short - will not work). I only tried it with Photon, maybe later will test it with Omega. Update: I reinstalled older version of Tau GUI (2012) and was surprised to find there Ethernet tab with controls similar to Photon GUI (later version - 2015 - seems to be missing it and I couldn't install Pleora under Windows 7) . I was able to stream / capture digital output from Tau 1.5 camera (with Photon convertion kit). This will not work with Tau 1.7 640 or any Tau 2. For explanation see my other listing with SIPO module. It could work - but it requires different cable with extra pair of wires for second line of serial digital video. It should be attached directly to 30 pin Samtec connector on Photon convertion kit - without 15 pin connector which cripples digital video for Tau 640 and Tau 2 cameras. And if you have Photon 640 - it needs different cable too.  On another note - I tried to use Omega with Researcher Pro 2.8 - but can't make it work - some error on Researcher part Pleora-wise.