Originally Posted by KeithLuneau

It probably was stored at full charge... I usually do a store charge on my R/C lipos, just never put much thought into this little camera one.

For anyone else wondering, the #3 lipo looks identical to the one in my #11, even the number on it was the same. The broken #3 has been sitting around over a year, the pack measured 3.8V. I soldered it in, and recorded about 5 minutes with it like it was, and it wasn't dead yet, so that's a good sign. I'm charging it now, will test later and report!

Hi Keith,

The #3 cells are the same size, but are supposedly not as much mAh capacity. It will work, but probably not as long as a healthy stock battery. I used a good high C-rated Hyperion G3 cell in mine while waiting for a replacement. it was 180 mAH and would record for only 25 min.

BTW, it is pointless to store the camera at a specific charge level because even when it is turned off the cell is still powering the internal clock. So it will eventually run down the battery no matter what. Best protection is to periodically plug in the camera to the USB port for a brief period to keep it from fully draining. The battery has an LVC/high voltage protection circuit board on it, so it should stop powering the clock before the cell is over-discharged. But the stock cells are not very high quality, and they seem to plate up and lose capacity and amp delivery much quicker that our RC hobby power lipos. And who knows how accurate the protection circuits are?

Originally Posted by ca323

I did go through the external battery options in the thread, but the seller told me the camera would go for 90 minutes not 30. I guess battery pack it is.

The Jumbo version of the #11 WILL record for 90+ minutes, but it has a larger cell in it. So there was some mis-communication between you and your Ebay seller.

Originally Posted by Paxman

I think this is very interesting! I checked out your site and I´m waiting for you to do some more finds on this matter. Please keep us updated!

Today I tried to trace the pin wires from the removed 0R resistor. I supposed that there is a resistor voltage divisor that converts the voltage to the 3.3V or lower levels of the processor, and changing the divisor I would be able to detect 3V on D+ instead of 5V on pin 1. I did not find any such part. It seems that the pin is connected to the semi-through hole and wired in one of internal layers of the PCB directly to the processor. It makes sense, but it complicates the modification.

Now I have a pin where I can control the camera behavior (left pin of the removed 0R on the image).

If I connect more than 4.3V there, idle camera switches to the mass storage mode (touch, release, and LED goes down exactly as it does after computer USB cable removal). If I connect 4.1V or more, camera stays in normal mode. (It explains, why the camera often leaves webcam or mass storage mode with a thin USB cable.)

So basically I would need to build a circuit that detects 3V bias voltage on the D+ line. When it is present, I should connect the pin to 5V, otherwise keep it open. Guessing that RC filter and open collector repeater may provide such function.

Maybe there is a better way to do it, but not having the main chip datasheet and the firmware source code, it is impossible to find it.

Hey Guys,

I played with the cams this past weekend. It's not RC but I bet you enjoy it....

I sent this link to friends that I usually bore with my RC videos so I'll just copy my email note here for you guys rather than retype it.

------

Hey Guys,

For those of you that have suffered through my endless airplane videos
here's something a little different. I took the $50 Keyfob Cam and
mounted it on some sports cars this weekend. I only have the footage
from my Caterham (Lotus) Super Seven uploaded. This is the raw footage
with no editing. This was a test of the cam and mount so these are hot
laps but not over the top hot laps. I follow a good friend for a while
to get some car to car footage then pick it up a bit to get some video
in open air.

I'm on street tires and you can tell by the high pitch sound of them.
Later on in the week I'll up load video from some 911's we took turning
1:24's and1:26's. That video is from a low angle so you feel like the
video was sped up but it's not.

This was just a relaxed set of hot laps enjoying the Seven, the day, and
keeping up with some GT3's till they hit the front straight where they
went bye bye.

To give you some references on the main straight when the silver Lotus
goes by I'm going about 110mph. The Seven does about 123mph on that
straight but I wasn't pushing it. At the jump we crest it about 90mph,
land the car, then turn, I'm in 3rd gear most of the track except the
sharp corner after the jump(5B) which is down to 2nd , back to 3rd after the
toilet bowl, and top that out on the back straight. If I'm pushing I
grab fourth both before the jump and on the back straight. At the
hairpin after the back straight it's 2nd gear, then work up to 5th
before the start finish stand. Foot flat till turn one. Brake and down shift from 5th to 3rd for turn one and repeat.....

I was just really enjoying the Seven and not pushing to that limit. Lots of
opportunity to capture more video later as I now have a mount that works.

For those of you that haven't seen anything like this before you will
see my speed build as I get heat into my tires and after I pass the red
911(993).

All in all it's a cool video from a $50 HD Cam !!


Be sure to watch it in HD. Set the volume to 1/4 for the best sound.

Grattan 2011 (11 min 52 sec)

Joe


------

The cam was behind my windscreen.

I'll add a pic of the car to this post tomorrow. I'm at the wrong computer to do that now. So check back if you're interested.

Joe

I kept having to wipe the bugs off my teeth
Glad to see a real car being thrashed hard found the track.
Thanks
Mike

Originally Posted by Tom Frank

OK... so it's an intermittant problem. Deleting files from the card should not affect anything. It sounds like perhaps the card memory space is corrupted. Have you checked your memory card's integrity or tried a different card?

Try re-formatting your flash memory card using the SDformatter utility, then testing the memory using the H2testw utility. Both are free downloads (Google for download sites). Once you have confirmed the memory card is good and it still does this with different cards, it must be some problem with the camera circuitry. But I'd try reflashing in the firmware as a last resort. I'd ask for a replacement if you can't get it resolved.

Can I format the flash card using the utility when the card is in the camera attached to my pc via the usb?

Thanks Mike,

All the track guys think I'm talking about RC when I mention the wings of my Seven

Alas.. separated by a common language.

Joe

Originally Posted by Joespeeder

Thanks Mike,

All the track guys think I'm talking about RC when I mention the wings of my Seven

Alas.. separated by a common language.

Joe

& the glazed look when you mention the boot of your car.
M

Originally Posted by dmoshiloh

Can I format the flash card using the utility when the card is in the camera attached to my pc via the usb?

Yes, you can. I'd make sure the camerra has a good cable and plugged directly in to the PC USB port for solid power and communication. If you have a card reader, that's a more robust connection, though.

Originally Posted by Tom Frank

Check the video editing links in teh FAQs (post #3) for more info on MPcam2AVI and Vdub.

I converted a native 20 min. #11 video from .mov to .avi using the MP4camtoAvi utility to get a lossless .AVI file (took 4 secs. to convert), then importing that into Vdub, and exporting with video set for "Direct Copy", NO audio, and frame rate set to 338 fps (to get the same speedup you referenced), which took 34 sec. So about 1 minute to produce that sped-up file even with the program changes.

The playback with WMP was jerky on my PC, which has a lot of memory and a fast video card, probably because the native h.264 video codec over taxed my system playing back at the fast rate. I did not have this problem when I converted an H.264 video to a .WMV file playing at 64x normal speed with a WLMM converted file!

<edit> WHOA! I rebooted my system because it was sluggish on several tasks I had running. Now after a reboot to clean up my system, that sped-up file plays back at full speed with no pauses whatsoever! <edit>

Mr. Frank,

Sorry to be so much trouble, but I got through step 1 with camtoavi. It works great, converted an 80 minute car trip in a little over 8 minutes (14% real time) with no perceptable loss of quality. It did make 4 separate avi files, but step 2 will take care of that.

I am having trouble with opening the avi files with Vdub. It gives me the error message below. I cannot find anything in the thread (searched it) about where to get the required codec. Error message attached.

Any assistance appreciated.

I did finally get the time lapse of the entire 80 minute trip converted with VideoPad, but it took basically the real time of the video to convert. I'm hoping to use the keycams to film entire cross country drives by saving from the keycams to the laptop, and doing the conversions overnight for each leg of the trip. The 80 minute trip takes 8+ minutes to view, so I intend to speed it up more. The 80 minute trip compressed is = 800mph! A short sample is also attached below,(Baton Rouge), but for some reason youtube doesn't show the 720p version.

I want to compare the quality of the Videopad's one step, but long conversion to the two step camtoavi-vdub combination.

Mainly I will use the two keycams on the wings of my Radian Pro, but they will be multi-taskers for sure. Sorry if the time-lapse thing is OT or distracting.
EDIT: Not sure what happened to the beginning of this video. Perhaps clipping it out of the long file using RealPlayer snarled it.

Fast Motion Test (1 min 24 sec)

Originally Posted by JumpySticks

Mr. Frank,

...
I am having trouble with opening the avi files with Vdub. It gives me the error message below. I cannot find anything in the thread (searched it) about where to get the required codec. Error message attached.
...

See the FAQs in Post #3, very first link under the Video Editing title. You need to get the ffdshow codec pack to get the H.264 codec to decode the video using Vdub. A link is provided there. Then once in Vdub, you can reset the Source Frame Rate in the Video menu to you selected speed. To output with no re-encoding or quality loss, you then go into the Video menu and select "Direct Stream Copy". Finally, in the File menu, select "Save as AVI", and your file will be saved at the new frame rate.

FWIW, you can set the size of the file chunks that MP4cam2AVI outputs using the toggle in the lower right corner of it's window. Maybe you already saw that. The largest file chunk size is about 2GB... not sure if that is bigger than your individual videos or not. Once you get all your individual clips sped up, you can load the first one back into Vdub, then append each one in succession using the "File/Append AVI Segment" menu item. Once all are loaded, just reset for Direct Stream copy" output, and save out the joined files as one long .AVI video. You could then load that into another editor to add text overlays, transitions, etc. if you want. But Video Pad can do that, too. Once you have the ffdshow codecs installed, WMM should also be able to load and play the H.264 codec .AVI files.

Good luck. Let me know what you find. Also, just curious what codec you used to out your file with VideoPad. Anything other than H.264 will inflate the file size, but maybe make playback easier on your computer.

Tom,

Thank you so much for your answers in post #5010! Sorry for missing stuff that is already posted. I´m doing my best to read all the information but sometimes it gets a little overwhelming... especially since English is not my native language...

Hi guys
Have just seen this http://www.youtube.com/user/georgitu.../1/cWaEoMAf1Z8 and it blew my socks off (still looking for them!)
Just love the way it captures the full form of the Fox. I'm sure it is a camera angle that would appeal to my non RC friends as well, because it shows how the video was created.

Have searched here, but having trouble finding an up to date mention of a vendor.

Can anyone help?

Kev

This is just fish eye lens, you can bought from ebay, or DX...

There are two different fish eye lenses commonly sold on eBay and DX, probably more... lol I've got a "W-67" and "FE-12". Get the FE-12 if you get one, the other one blurs the image around the edges a lot! The FE-12 works well on the #11 though.

By the way, I got nearly 40 minutes with the battery replaced in my camera, it's all good to go for a while longer now.