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TEMPERATURE MONITORING IMAGING WITH NIR ANALYZER CONTROL

CHALLENGE

To develop a low-cost solution to synchronized IR video streaming, video viewing and NIR analyzer control. Custom written software would control and collect results from an industry-leading NIR analyzer as it fed back results of a high-temperature mixing process. Additionally, the software would be responsible for streaming video feed from a FLIR A320 camera to MPEG4 format, synchronized in time to results collected via the analyzer.

SOLUTION

The NIR Analyzer provided a specialized communication protocol, allowing a series of custom-written LabVIEW wrapper VI's to take control remotely. This allowed the controlling application to invoke scans, retrieve results and perform analyses.

There were a number of solutions for retrieving and streaming-to-disk video from the FLIR A320. However, keeping cost-effectiveness in mind, VideoLAN Organization offered an open-source API allowing a LabVIEW routine to utilize it to access the camera's video stream (RTSP) and dump it to disk in the desired MPEG4 format.

Given the nature of the process being monitored, peak temperature feedback was key to process control. Using LabVIEW's TCP utility VI's, a telnet session could be established with the camera further allowing the controlling application to query for peak temperature and process as necessary.