Last modified on April 24th, 2024 at 11:25 am
Its All About Integration
It all started for us trying to match the performance of a famous open framed Sony block camera. It’s an open frame, visible camera that has been around in some form or another for at least 20 years. Companies and teams integrated the visible camera into airborne systems, ground systems and found it incredibly useful. Soon after it was apparent there was a market for the same component with an infrared camera. That motivation inspired us to look at the infrared camera optics, sensors and electronics to try and come up with the equivalent of the open frame camera that Sony kicked off many, many years ago.
Different Requirements Per Application
An example of a open frame camera from our product line is the Ventus Compact MK II. This camera is a mid wave camera and our example has a 19-275 millimeter focal length lenses. Mid wave cameras speak to our heritage as we’ve shipped over 4,000 mid wave systems for airborne applications. The airborne industry is looking for a lightweight system with no extra electronics. If our team were to put a housing around a system our clients would remove the housing to take away any unnecessary weight. They install the system into a stabilized gimbal system with precision stabilization, and that acts as a housing unto itself.
Ground surveillance is another solution we are very familiar with. In this situation weight is less of a concern over tight integration into different types of positioning systems like pan-tilt-zoom-units(PTZU). These systems can be outdoors round the clock in extreme conditions and usually have an IP sealed rating.
What Enclosures Add
Vayu HD
With an open frame camera you could hit wires and damage the system. Sometimes there is enough motivation for us to come up with enclosed versions of our cameras. The Vayu HD, the only long wave, full HD camera, was designed for airborne applications. It’s a light weight minimalist camera with the right combination of temperature displacement surfaces, weight balancing and rigidity.
Vayu HD-Industrial
The IP rated enclosed version of the Vayu HD, the Vayu HD-Iindustrial, is a much heavier version of the camera. It also includes rugged waterproof connectors in the back and the housing has also been designed to absorb more heat, since an enclosure can act like a blanket and trap heat.
We realize that our product line does not look like typical cameras. Our success with our customers is the cameras ability to integrate into multiple and diverse imaging systems. We take in to account the size, weight and power that can be used to make each IR integration successful.