FOXWELL RT280 Thermal Imaging Camera 240x180 Infrared

A thermal camera is the fastest way to answer the question every transmission job starts with: is this unit actually getting hot, and where. Point the RT280 at a case, a converter housing, or a pair of cooler lines and you get a full temperature picture instead of the single dot an infrared thermometer gives you. A dragging clutch pack, a slipping converter, a restricted cooler, or a plugged cooler line shows up as a bright spot you can see from three feet away, before it cooks the fluid and takes the unit out.

On the bench and in the bay the usual checks are the same every time. Run the vehicle up to temperature and shoot both cooler lines at the radiator or the auxiliary cooler: the inlet should read hotter than the return, and a small split between them means flow is restricted. Shoot the pan and the case at idle and again after a road test to see how fast the unit is climbing. Shoot the converter area on a slipping unit and compare it to the tail housing. Shoot a solenoid pack or a shorted harness connector and the failing circuit is the one glowing. The built-in laser pointer and LED light let you aim it up under a vehicle where you cannot see the screen and the target at the same time.

The imager runs a 120x90 detector with TISR super resolution that brings the effective image up to 240x180 on a 2.8 inch 320x240 screen, with a 50 by 38 degree field of view and a 25 Hz refresh so the picture stays smooth while you sweep across a part. Measurement range is -4 F to 1022 F with plus or minus 3.6 F or 2 percent accuracy, which covers everything from a cold cooler return to an exhaust component sitting next to the pan. It tracks the hottest, coldest, and center points automatically and can alarm on a high or low limit you set. Nine color palettes let you pick the one that separates a 20 degree difference best on the part you are looking at.

Images and video save to 8 GB of built-in eMMC storage, over 20,000 of them, so you can document a before-and-after on a customer's cooler restriction or keep a record of what a unit looked like the day it came in. The included Windows PC software does point, line, and area temperature analysis, 2D and 3D rendering, and report generation. The housing is IP54 rated against dust and splash and is drop rated to 6.6 feet, which matters in a shop where tools land on concrete.