Product Review: Topdon TC004 Thermal Imaging Camera

This is a product review of the Topdon TC004 thermal imaging camera. Please expand the video description for extra notes.

Want to buy one? https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BRK4SGD2 (link goes to Amazon US, and is not an affiliate or tracking link of any sort...)

As a standalone thermal imaging camera, this seems to work well. I believe the occasional pauses have to do with sensor calibration.

Unfortunately, software bugs hinder the ability to use this with your computer. The provided software for Windows computers struck me as opaque and incomprehensible, beyond working with locally stored images you've taken previously. It claims to let you perform further analysis on images. I didn't have the patience to study it in any detail. Maybe if you do, it is more useful than it looks.

Videos recorded with the camera are stretched and very distorted from the native 256x192 (HxW) to fit in a 1280x720 frame, in PAL format only at 25 frames per second. There's no point to this -- the sensor hasn't got anywhere that much resolution and is oriented differently (look at the screen!), which only makes it worse. Still pictures turn out fine. To get the videos into my editing software (Serif MoviePlus X5) took some massaging beforehand with VideoLAN's VLC. I can only guess that MoviePlus couldn't handle whatever container was used by the camera. It can certainly handle h.264 encoded video.

The camera operates in two modes: as a USB mass storage device or a USB video class camera (think "webcam"). Neither one works quite correctly, although the mass storage mode is at least usable for its intended purpose on any major computing platform.

Internally, it is a Linux based device and appears to be built around a Huawei system-on-chip. Depending upon its mode of operation, the camera presents as several different USB devices. Those are:

in mass storage mode: "Linux File-Stor Gadget Device", VID 0525, PID A4A5, serial number SN7890 (dubious)

in USB video class ("camera") mode, there are two devices enumerated:
1. USB Composite Device, VID 12D1, PID 0000 (!)
2. USB Video Device, VID 12D1, PID 0000 (!)
and the name "Iray MCamera" is also seen, with a reported serial number of 12345678 (obviously dubious).

in firmware update mode, two devices are enumerated
1. RNDIS, "Multifunction Composite Gadget", VID 1D6B, PID 0104
2. USB Serial Device, "Multifunction Composite Gadget", VID 1D6B, PID 0104