Challenge

Colbert Infrared (www.colbert-infrared.com) performs thermal inspections for a variety of small and large companies. By performing thermal inspections on pieces of equipment and buildings, defects and wear often unseen with the naked eye can be identified before severe damage is done saving time and money in equipment costs and downtime. Colbert Infrared uses Thermal Trend (www.thermaltrend.com) to track the inspections and the data collected at each inspection. The entire development effort was managed and performed by Pacific Northwest Software while working closely with thermographers and sales and marketing personnel from Colbert Infrared and their customers.

Thermal Trend runs on both a traditional desktop PC and on Microsoft's Pocket PC platform. The interface for each application is nearly identical. Data is shared between platforms eliminating the need for double entry. Additionally, Thermal Trend's open architecture and use of Microsoft's SQL Server database engine make it perfect for organizations of any size.

Thermal Trend also contains a suite of Microsoft Reporting Services reports that, among other things, allows thermographers to view trends in thermographic data, manage assets, and perform cost-benefit analysis of potential repairs.

In addition to data collection, Thermal Trend contains a thermal image viewer, analyzer, and manager compatible with industry leaders such as FLIR, Fluke, Guide IR and Mikron to name a few. In the past organizations that used two or more different brands of thermal cameras were required to use brand-specific (and proprietary) viewing software to view their images. Pacific Northwest Software cracked the most common formats giving companies a single, consolidated application to view, analyze and manage their thermal images.

Thermal Trend started out "life" as an application developed using Microsoft's Visual Basic 6 and Microsoft's Embedded Visual Tools (for creating the Pocket PC version of the application). It used Microsoft Access as the desktop database engine/reporting engine and Pocket Access as the Pocket PC database engine. ActiveSync technology seamlessly synchronized data between the desktop and the mobile device. November 2005 saw the release of Microsoft's latest mobile platform, Windows Mobile 5. With it came the unfortunate fact that Microsoft dropped support for Pocket Access and Desktop Access-Pocket Access synchronization. This meant changing databases to something that would accommodate synchronization between the Pocket PC and the desktop. The most reasonable choice was Microsoft's SQL Server CE for the Pocket PC and Microsoft SQL Server for the desktop. The decision was made to convert Thermal Trend from being a Visual Basic 6/Embedded Visual Tools application to being a Microsoft.Net 2.0 application because the newer tools had far better support for the more current database engines.

The Sites screen allows the user to choose between different inspection sites.

The Inspection screen displays current and previous inspections and allows the user to create a new inspection, view previous inspections, or view reports for previous inspections.

The Route screen displays the inspection route and allows the user to select locations or equipment on that route. Once a location or piece of equipment is selected, the previous problems can be displayed in the Items screen or new problems can be created.

"Smart Icons" indicate whether the icon is a location or piece of equipment, if a problem has been found at the location or piece of equipment indicated by the icon, and if the location or piece of equipment has been tested.

The Items screen displays the problems or observations made at a piece of equipment or location and allows the user to create new problems or observations and schedule a repair for a piece of equipment.

The icons indicate the problem type and the status of the problem (open or closed).

The History screen displays "time over temperature trending" of problem statuses tracked over multiple inspections automatically as well as scheduling of repairs and corrective actions.

The Detail screen displays the specifics of an observations such as component temperature, reference temperature, and ambient temperature.

The Visual Image screen displays captured visual images of tested equipment.

The Infrared Image screen displays captured infrared images of tested equipment. The desktop version allows the user to perform detailed analysis of the image.

Detailed reporting of problems using Microsoft Reporting Tools includes all relevant data and both visual and infrared images.