Camera Car Build

[peteski]

@DKS - another "slaps head and exclaims" moment.  The use of a loco chassis is a great idea.  Not only do you get heft, but you get milled out voids to hold batteries and switches.

@Eric - to quote an infamous California pop culture . . . figure . . . even in low light, your track is the shizzle!

Not taking away from DKS's cleaver install in a heavy loco chassis, I have been doing just this type of installations for many years. My first install (done in 2004) is documented in Kato's gallery.  Funny thing is that we both used the same loco (P42).  I also don't see a need for having the camera steerable. IMO, its field of vision is so wide that it doesn't need to tilt into curves.

http://www.katousa.com/gallery/albums/Peter-Wisniewski/aaa.highlight.jpg
Peter Wisniewski, of Tewksbury MA, installed a miniature camera he purchased from Japan into the hollowed out mechanism of a P42 model. The camera is designed to be used with either DC or DCC power. It also has a small NiCad (rechargeable) battery. It is small enough that it (and the battery) can be totally hidden inside the body of the model. Peter simply puts this unit ahead of another motorized P42 and pushes it out in front of his train for some great shots!!

Rest of the writeup and photos: http://www.katousa.com/gallery/Peter-Wisniewski


I have also posted some videos taken with one of my TC-9 cameras in page 4 of this thread (they have better lighting than Eric's).
https://www.therailwire.net/forum/index.php?topic=28477.msg300778#msg300778

I agree that this camera has inferior video quality compared to many current cameras (like Looxcie). It has a standard VGA resolution and the colors aren't as vivid as today's cameras. After all, it was developed about 10 years ago.  Still, I like its wide field of vision, dept of field and the very versatile power supply.  Hey, different people have different priorities. 

[Zox]

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David, on the comparison video, it looks to me like the Looxcie isn't actually keeping up with 30fps--the motion of objects in the field of view is jerkier than with the TC-9. Was something possibly mis-set?

The footage from the TC-9 looks a lot like my camera car in terms of interference, but mine doesn't seem to have as much problem with washout. Of course, the camera I'm using is also significantly larger, so that's another tradeoff.

[DKS]

Not taking away from DKS's cleaver install in a heavy loco chassis, I have been doing just this type of installations for many years. My first install (done in 2004) is documented in Kato's gallery.  Funny thing is that we both used the same loco (P42).  I also don't see a need for having the camera steerable. IMO, its field of vision is so wide that it doesn't need to tilt into curves.

My first camera car builds date from 1998-99, back when the very first wireless micro-cams became available. By comparison to today's cameras, they were awful. Only worked on a 9V battery, which lasted for about 20 minutes, and the receiver had to be tuned manually, like an analog radio, to receive the signal--which in turn was piped into a VCR (remember those?) if you wanted to record the image. Later, I transferred the recordings to PC, and I may still have those files, although they're not worth keeping, really.

My primary purpose in building camcars is to video-document layouts, as opposed to provide an engineer's point of view in realtime. Consequently I rarely bother to disguise the camera. On one of the rare occasions I did, I installed the camera in a snowplow, designed such that the plow itself was the focus ring. It was still an earlier generation camera, so the quality wasn't quite up to the job. Recently I installed a Looxcie board in an Atlas RS-3 shell, although it's rather awkward to use. As for the steering mechanism, I prefer it over a rigid mount. The difference is quite subtle; it's a little more fluid in appearance. I suppose it satisfies the fussy video producer in me.

David, on the comparison video, it looks to me like the Looxcie isn't actually keeping up with 30fps--the motion of objects in the field of view is jerkier than with the TC-9. Was something possibly mis-set?

It could be. I just pulled it out of the box and popped it on the track, without checking any of the settings. It could also be an attribute of the software used to port the Looxcie files into the authoring application I used, which did not have the appropriate filter to accept the Looxcie's native file type. The effect is most noticeable in the side-by-side as I had to tweak the frame rate in order to synchronize both sequences.

Each camera has its pros and cons, and there isn't an overwhelming winner, IMO. However, of the two, overall I prefer the Looxcie.