The first integration of GALATEA MW on Etronika’s prototype

Dariusz Szczygieł, technical director at Etronika, explains the first integration of GALATEA MW on Etronika's prototype. 

“THE GALATEA MW DETECTOR WAS EASY TO INTEGRATE”

• Can you tell us about yourself and your company?

What are your core businesses, your products and your target markets?
Etronika is a high-tech company that specializes in designing and manufacturing of optical and optoelectronic systems primarily for the defense industry, but also for scientific and civil applications. Etronika is a private company that was founded in Poland in 2002. The company started with seven employees, but now employs about 50 people, more than a third of whom are engineers. Etronika is the second largest manufacturer of optoelectronic systems for defense applications in Poland.

• How long have you been working with LYNRED?

We started working on thermal imaging detectors back in 2004, and that is when we began collaborating with ULIS (before it merged to become LYNRED). These detectors were initially uncooled bolometrer matrices. In 2013 we built our first thermal imaging camera based on the cooled Scorpio MWIR sensor from Sofradir.

• You recently incorporated and tested LYNRED’s new Galatea MW infrared detector. Why did you choose this product? What are your impressions? How would you evaluate the detector in terms of performance and ease of integration? How would you rate the detector against a rival product?

We chose the Galatea detector due to the growing market for drones and mobile devices. Despite being a new product we did not experience any problems during integration. We did not carry out extensive performance testing, but everything is absolutely fine on our side. Galatea performs well against others products.

• What benefits does the Galatea MW detector bring to your solutions?

The main advantage with Galatea is obviously its size, which has a significant positive impact. What makes it so significant is that despite the reduced dimensions, it retains the optical configuration, meaning that the detector should work with off-the-shelf wide lenses.

«THE MAIN ADVANTAGE WITH GALATEA MW IS ITS SIZE, WHICH HAS A SIGNIFICANT POSITIVE IMPACT»

• Have you already received initial on-the-ground feedback / feedback from customers? If so, could you tell us about the feedback? (example: display at the MSPO exhibition, initial feedback)

We mainly received feedback during the MSPO show (from 6 to 9 september in Poland), which was positive. Not surprisingly, the camera’s dimensions attracted attention.

• What support and guidance did the LYNRED teams provide during the development of the camera?

Not much support required, since the Galatea MW detector was easy to integrate. We only had to clear up a couple of ambiguities in the documentation.