Fujifilm FCR XG-1 X-ray Image Scanner Teardown (Part 1 of 3)

Part 1: Teardown of a Fujifilm FCR XG-1 x-ray image scanner / digitizer. Also known as Computerized Radiography (CR), it fulfills the job of scanning a x-ray exposed image plate with a laser beam and extract each pixel illumination with a photo multiplier tube setup. It can scan 72 plate per hour with a maximum resolution of 7080 X 9480 in 12 bits per pixel gray scale.

Teardown pictures

The scanner is normally delivered as a standalone system with a single PC for operation.

The unit I found was stripped for all outer plastic parts, user interfaces and the computer compartment was empty of cards, leaving only bare bus mainboard behind. Teardown and reverse engineering of the PMT assembly will be covered in part 3.

The mainboard or bus backplane has board names printed on to it. I was able to find out that the CPU12A board uses two Altera Flex FPGAs in a main (machine control) / sub (image handling) CPU setup and has a SMSC Feast FD LAN91C100FDQFP Ethernet controller for 100 Mbit networking. It uses a VxWorks RTOS with a default login cr-ir346 and password is cr-ir346 as well. Great security there! Default IP address 172.16.1.10 which seems a little unusual.

Here is closeup pictures of stepper motor driver boards, mechanical parts, power supply for the photomultiplier tube and belt driven casette feeder. It also features a few badly translated warning labels, half of them does not make any sense.

The power supply is a Lambda / Densei-Lambda model Alpha 4000 with model name MA4000256J. It is a modular power supply with 5 output slots and this particular configuration has outputs at 5V, 15V and 24V at different current ratings. Each power supply module is isolated from the others.

The scanning laser is packaged inside a black plastic enclosure and will be covered in part 2. There seems to be a external power supply /conditioning board for a stable power supply near the laser module itself.

You might also enjoy to see the teardown of a much bigger x-ray scanner unit from AGFA.