FLIR AX8 Thermal Imaging Camera for Continuous Condition and Safety Monitoring

Determining how to power this device is a mess and locating it's IP address is another mess. It took two engineers over 2 weeks just to ping the camera.It does not come with a power supply and cannot be powered out of the box. Even the customer support is deeply confused about it. The two connectors have different power limitations. For some more money, you can buy a cable (M-12A to bare wires), and power it to 10.8 - 30V with a bench-top power supply like some sort of student project. For even more money, you can buy PoE infrastructure (switch or PoE injector) and power it through it's M-12X connector, which can handle higher voltages in compliance with 802.3af. A PoE switch is more useful as infrastructure goes but you CANNOT locate the IP address through a PoE switch.It was quite a frustrating adventure trying to communicate with the AX8 camera. We bought a PoE switch to power it, since we think we'll need to drive other PoE devices as well. We're trying to get it connected to a Ubuntu system, but the FLIR IP config tool doesn't work on anything but Windows. So we connected it to a Windows 10 system and tried to communicate it using the IP Config tool. The IP config tool failed to locate the camera, apparently because of the inline PoE switch. Following the advice of a FLIR forum on the subject, we tried packet sniffing with Wireshark to see if we could locate the IP address. That failed completely, with no packets returned from the camera. After about 4 engineer-days of head scratching we dragged out a bench-top DC supply and mangled some ill-fitting pin-connectors with pliers to directly power the M12-A pins, then directly connect the AX8 to the windows machine. That finally allowed us to get the IP address of the camera and begin communicating with it and put it.