Originally Posted by TJFINAN

Im wondering if anybody has modified one of these KeyCams to take a series of photos, not video...in other words, have it take a photo, say, every two seconds?

A guy did it with a non-HD version:
http://www.chucklohr.com/808/#TimeLapseRelayMod

Originally Posted by TJFINAN

Hello, total newcomer to this.

Im wondering if anybody has modified one of these KeyCams to take a series of photos, not video...in other words, have it take a photo, say, every two seconds?

I suppose you could extract the photos from video, but this approach would seem to save on memory consumption, and possibly battery consumption?

I don't think is has been done for this camera like was done for the old 808 camera. I think it is possible, but not worth the effort.

This camera has a 1.3 megapixel CMOS sensor. The camera still images are 2592 x 1944 pixels, or about 5 mega pixels. This is not possible without upsizing the CMOS image (e.g. digitally zoomed) by about 2x, so you lose a lot of resolution and images look more fuzzy than the video which records the actual pixel size from the CMOS sensor. Much sharper images are obtain just by capturing individual frames from the video.

I am now testing the emergency charger. I recorded video without the charger connected, until the internal battery was empty.

Now recharging with the emergency charger, red LED is on (on the charger).
It's charging now already for 1.5 hrs....

So even if you could record continuously, the charger can not supply enough current to keep filling the internal camera battery....

Will report later how long it took to charge, and how much mAh I could charge back into the 2000 mAh Eneloop AA battery.

Thanks for your reply.

This makes sense. I would like to experiment with using the photographs for landscape reconstruction using photogrammetry, and, as long as the focal length doesnt change, I would tend to think that the images extracted from video would work.

Originally Posted by Tom Frank

I don't think is has been done for this camera like was done for the old 808 camera. I think it is possible, but not worth the effort.

This camera has a 1.3 megapixel CMOS sensor. The camera still images are 2592 x 1944 pixels, or about 5 mega pixels. This is not possible without upsizing the CMOS image (e.g. digitally zoomed) by about 2x, so you lose a lot of resolution and images look more fuzzy than the video which records the actual pixel size from the CMOS sensor. Much sharper images are obtain just by capturing individual frames from the video.

mavlo77-

When I tested the E-charger it took little over 2 hours before the red lite on charger went off...actually it dont go off completely but real dimm...I got 2-20 min clips...so I tried same thing again with fresh AA battery in charger but this time during recording I plugged back in charger to see if I could get 3-20min files...that didnt work...I got 0 files...like I never hit record button...tried yet again and same thing happened 0 files...so im kinda baffled...I would like to know what the E-charger can really do but Ive spent hours messing with it and still no further than when I started...

Thanks Finster,
The charger stopped right after posting my message. So it took 1.5 hrs to "completely" charge the camera. You're right, the LED doesn't go completely off.

But disappointing is that after disconnecting the charger, the camera recorded 0 video's. There was a lost file of 900 MB on the card. So in 1.5 hrs the charger couldn't even charge the camera enough for recording even 1 video..... So it doesn't completely charge the camera!

After this exercise I could charge 500 mAh in my AA battery...

So if I recalculate this 500 mAh @ 1.4V average to 5V, it's about 150 mAh @ 5V.... Minus the losses, it's indeed less than half the full capacity of the camera battery....

Perhaps -as Tom suggested- the emergency charger stops when the AA battery voltage is below a certain threshold. But then I have to conclude that this charger is of a poor design. Actually for me it's quite useless.....

So far my Eneloops are doing a very good job in all my electronics. So tend to suspect the $2 emergency charger......

It may only take 1.5 hours but I left mine on to see if light would go off completly...it didnt...You should be able to get 2-20min files charging dead cam with E-charger...One thing I would look for is that the E-charger circuit board is making good contact to case...if clear cap isnt tight enough it wont charge good...happened to me...with AA battery out try tightening the clear cap and see if it helps...I had like 1.27v left in AA battery after 2 hour charge...output was still around 5.34v...very confusing data...sometimes you get files and sometimes you dont

avia.avi (11 min 30 sec)

First use of the keychain cam on flight for me ,very pleased , but i noticed it doesnt like low light /end of the day condition

.mov is painful to handle and i am loosing the sound when converting to AVI in virtualdubmod , anyonecan help getting a clean AVI from the camera plz?

PS: anyone got news from the AV out one ?

Originally Posted by vulpina

.mov is painful to handle and i am loosing the sound when converting to AVI in virtualdubmod , anyonecan help getting a clean AVI from the camera plz?

PS: anyone got news from the AV out one ?

I use AviDemux, and can convert to .avi with video and sound, as long as you re-encode and not use the direct "copy" mode. For some reason, if that is used for the video, the .AVI file does not have any video when later edited or play in anything I have, except VLC will play (but not edit) it.

I don't know any more about the AV out one, and personally have no interest in it since it has been reported to have 30% dropped frames! Unacceptable! Might be OK as an FPV camera, but little else. A new thread should be started for it when (if?) it ever does appear since it is totally different inside and will have nothing in common with the one we are discussing here.

Originally Posted by mavlo77

Thanks Finster,
The charger stopped right after posting my message. So it took 1.5 hrs to "completely" charge the camera. You're right, the LED doesn't go completely off.

But disappointing is that after disconnecting the charger, the camera recorded 0 video's. There was a lost file of 900 MB on the card. So in 1.5 hrs the charger couldn't even charge the camera enough for recording even 1 video..... So it doesn't completely charge the camera!

After this exercise I could charge 500 mAh in my AA battery...

So if I recalculate this 500 mAh @ 1.4V average to 5V, it's about 150 mAh @ 5V.... Minus the losses, it's indeed less than half the full capacity of the camera battery....

Perhaps -as Tom suggested- the emergency charger stops when the AA battery voltage is below a certain threshold. But then I have to conclude that this charger is of a poor design. Actually for me it's quite useless.....

So far my Eneloops are doing a very good job in all my electronics. So tend to suspect the $2 emergency charger......

I think I've come to the same conclusions. If used just as an emergency charger, it would have been much better to use two AA cells in series, and just double the voltage rather than quad. Or a 4 cell flight pack with no voltage doubling... I have a 4 cell NiCad pack rated at 600 mAh that came with my TX that I've never used, but maybe it will be just the ticket for recharging the camera with a direct connection. I'm also going to try one more test with a plain old disposable alkaline cell in the emergency charger to see if a different battery chemistry makes any difference.

Bought mine on January 28, received February 10. I paid 49 USD to hotbid365@gmail.com for the camera, including the charger, and negotiated for a 4GB USB card as well as for the date/time stamp to be factory removed. While I haven't figured out yet which program to use to enable the webcam function, I can say all other functions seem to be working as expected.

I'll need better light to determine the unit's focus, but compared to my old 5in1 eDVR, I can already see I'll be pleased with the new and improved results. And half the price too! Including the 4GB card!

So far, I've just cut/pasted the pics and vids from the card to my PC. Will I need to format this card at some point? I don't seem to be losing any capacity on the card doing it this way ... ?

Tom

Originally Posted by Thomas Nelson

Bought mine on January 28, received February 10. I paid 49 USD to hotbid365@gmail.com for the camera, including the charger, and negotiated for a 4GB USB card as well as for the date/time stamp to be factory removed. While I haven't figured out yet which program to use to enable the webcam function, I can say all other functions seem to be working as expected.

I'll need better light to determine the unit's focus, but compared to my old 5in1 eDVR, I can already see I'll be pleased with the new and improved results. And half the price too! Including the 4GB card!

So far, I've just cut/pasted the pics and vids from the card to my PC. Will I need to format this card at some point? I don't seem to be losing any capacity on the card doing it this way ... ?

Tom

Hi Tom,

You should format the card with a special program calle SDformatter... it's a free download if you Google for it. While formatting in your PC will work, it will not get the best performance from the card. One user reported his card would not work at all until he re-formatted it with that program, but I don't know if the card had been formatted rprio to that or not.

Many video players and editors have a "video capture" function, and will display/record the camera video output when you toggle it into webcam mode. The button sequence to do that is linked in post #3 if you haven't already found that.

Hey Guys,

Here's another test video.... Get out your air sickness bags !!! I velcro'd my HD KF cam to the bottom of my PZ T-28 at a small gym fly tonight.

I got lots more footage but I'll edit and compose a video tomorrow with those vids and pictures all from the KFC.

This video is the raw mov file uploaded to Youtube with Freemake. I flipped it but forgot to rotate it. If you notice the writing on the walls is backwards that's why.

The lighting in the gym is much easier for this cam to deal with so the video quality is a lot better than in the big arena where I took my last test footage.

We also stuck the KFC on one of those Ipad quadcopters. Pretty neat.

I'll post links as I post video. I'm still amazed how well the T-28 carries this cam. It takes more power and flys heavy but if I can do it in this little gym an outdoor flight like we saw on the Champ should be no problem.

Here's the raw rear view unedited video form one flight. Be sure to look at it full screenand in 720p. Enjoy.

Joe

PZ T-28 HD Keyfob cam footage Raw File (4 min 20 sec)

Originally Posted by Joespeeder

Hey Guys,

Here's another test video.... Get out your air sickness bags !!! I velcro'd my HD KF cam to the bottom of my PZ T-28 at a small gym fly tonight.

Joe

Joe, the video was tagged as "private", so can't be easily viewed. Can you un-tag it?