Hey ya'll. I'm thinking about trying to mount a wireless camera to one of my HO scale loco motives. Has anyone done this before? Can somone point me in the right direction? Any camera's that will transmit the live feed to my smart phone? Merry Christmas everyone!
Well, our club has something like that with an antenna, but it blacks out every time the car it is mounted in goes into a tunnel, and it is pretty small. It depends on what kind of video quality you want, and how much space you can spare inside the loco.
I'm beginning to realize that Windows 10 and sound decoders have a lot in common. There are so many things you have to change in order to get them to work the way you want.
If you're handy with electronical devices see if a camera out of a smartphone would work, some are about half the size of a sugar cube and could deliver decent image quality.
Steve
If everything seems under control, you're not going fast enough!
There are two kinds of cameras to consider. The first is as you describe, a live-feed video camera that will give you a cab-eye view of what the camera is seeing. The other type records the video and you must remove the memory chip to see it. Each has its plusses and minuses.
I installed one of the earlier models in a subway car. I used one of the unpowered cars in a Life-Like set, and put it at the front of the train while the powered unit was run as a "pusher" at the back. I also got a DCC power supply module, which the manufacturer kindly modified for a small fee so that all the parts would fit neatly in the dummy car.
This is what I started with:
And here are the modified components, installed in the car, shell removed:
I had to make some modifications to the shell, too. I removed the windows at the front to help cool the extra electronics. Here, you can see the red lens peeking through the center porthole on the door. The original headlights below have been removed and drilled out for larger LEDs, necessary to illuminate the tunnels.
As mentioned earlier, this kind of "live video feed" camera suffers dropouts as the signal gets blocked by scenery. I tested this theory by replacing the power supply with a battery to eliminate the possibility that the dropouts might be caused by track power loss, but that behaved the same way. The cameras that carry along the record electronics and memory chip give a much cleaner image, but you do have to pull the chip and put it into a camera or computer to see your image.
I recorded my scene on a camcorder, fed it into my computer and then edited it heavily, frame by frame, to get rid of the dropouts.
It takes an iron man to play with a toy iron horse.