Martin, RE Has anyone had any success with a miniature action camera filming time afloat on their models

I bought a couple of these cheap cameras off Ali Expr a few months ago. Very cheap and do a reasonable job for the price. They like a good sunny day to work well to get the colours working, and are very slow to transfer to your computer via USB. I found if you take the SD card out and put it in a reader, file transfer is much quicker. 720P and 30FPS is not brilliant, but if you want a record of on water running cheaply, these will do the job,- (an average quality vid is better than none, and they are cheap enough to be expendable). They come with a bracket as well which is handy for mounting on a boat.

There are not many of the tiny keychain cameras for sale any more for some reason, but these are still around. HK used to sell a better quality version of the same camera about 12 yrs ago, (white, and made by Vivitar US) as well as a number of others, but not any more unfortunately. You need to use a class 10, 32Gb micro SD card for best results with these.

JB

Another thought. To use a camera streaming back to the driver requires some sort of telemetry to obtain a reasonable range. Why not use a cheap mobile phone and a video chat app. Assume there must be an app that can record th video session. It’s possible that the camera could be removed from the PCB on flying leads, perhaps by a mobile repair place.

This would have a range well out of sight, long battery life and very cheap.
Your thoughts

Here in Australia you can get small cameras for mounting on car windscreens (Dash Cams). These are small and available in various resolutions. They need 12 Volts to operate but this should be easy to get from the main battery using a “Buck Boost” type regulator. These generally have a small screen and SD card.

Ebay, but quite a few years ago, they where called keychain cameras, and where very cheap. Probably spy cameras now, just buy a dead cheap one, see how it goes, they are mostly 1080p hd now, mine where poor quality

Love the video, where do you get the cameras from? Spence.

cheap keychain cameras, one front one back, and a mobius action cam attached to a cap brim with velcro for when I'm flying RC planes
this video was years ago, pre HD! so the quality would be much better now. capture video, and a cheap card reader for the pc, and simple editing using windows movie maker!

Yes Lew. As I said I will retry soon. Cheers Ian

Ian, does the film clip play in your operating system's (like Windows) media player?
Lew

Looks like my film clip didn't post. I will try again soon. Cheers Ian

In general I use VLC to play a lot of video formats
Alain

Sometimes I get the invalid file type error comes up even though the extension (mp4, etc.) looks right. What app did you use to edit the file?
Lew

I have just tried posting a shortened version but it came up with a notice saying invalid file? None the wiser now. Cheers Ian

Hi, The file is a MP4 and its 2,214,343 kb in size so quite large. Hope you can assist. Cheers Ian

I have had no problems uploading yo youtube. Do you know the file type (mp4, etc)? Could be many issues not related to the file type including session file time out. What do you have your sleep mode set at?
Lew
Florida (so far) , USA

Hi, I have a good clip I took on my RC yacht. Its an Electron and if you google it you will see the type. The file is quite large as its about 9 minutes long and I have tried to upload but it just drops it out. Can anybody tell me the max size for clips? Otherwise I will need to edit down a bit. Chees Ian

Well I have a GoPro but wanted to use something smaller than that. Boats 33-52 inches so a decent size but the GoPro is quite big. Resolution 1080p makes minimum, I’m not to fussed about first person view.

How large/small is your boat? What kind of video resolution are you looking for? I have been looking into this myself. Years ago (before GoPro) I used a small digital camera. Then I got a GoPro and use it occasionly, see attachment.

A major issue with using a camera fixed to the boat is stabilization caused by water action effect on the boat. One way to climate some of that is to record in a high definition and use an app that will stabilize the video by using the center part of the recorded video, identify objects, stabilize the object and crop the restcout. This will result in a lower definition video.

As for transmitting to a camera you will need to look at other attachments like drones use. All this will not conform to a "low price" requirement.

Lew
Florida (I think 😐), USA

I found a “cheap” about $10 camera off of Amazon. Camera will record on a memory card, however I also would like to view and record to my phone while sailing. With limited success I have gotten this to work, but the wireless connection is limited in distance to about 20’ from the phone.

I used a Gopro on my RC yacht and it worked well. Not sure if there would be any feed back on a motorised vessel. I need to edit the footage before I can load onto our site but will look at as soon as I can get to it. Cheers Ian