Poor Man’s Drone: 808 Keychain Camera with RC Copter
In my continuing quest to embark on arcane technology products that may or may not be worth the trouble, I bought myself the cheapest 808-style key chain camera I could find on Amazon.ca from seller “newbeem” out of Toronto.
Price including shipping: $10.
My goal is to find a way for about a hundred dollars (maybe less) to be able to take aerial photography of my garden and to stitch them together into an orthomosaic. It’s my “Poor Man’s Drone” experiment.
Of course, when you start a project like this, the needs of the technology you purchase tend to dictate your next steps. There’s no onboard memory with the 808 model I bought. In fact, I don’t know which 808 camera that “really” is. The seller tells me they themselves don’t know, but the manufacturer told them that it’s a #3. However, based on the identification tables on Chuck Lohr’s site, it doesn’t seem to completely match his criteria for an 808 #3 (the time stamp on mine is upper left and yellow). Though this video does pretty well to explain the basic functions:
Now, with 808 cameras (certain models anyway), you’re supposed to be able to have the camera generate something called a SYSCFG.txt file (system configuration). It’s a text-based file that gets dumped onto your memory card, in which you can change the settings and the mode of operation.
Right, I had to buy a memory card. Not an SD card, which I already had, but an even smaller Micro-SD card (class 4 or higher). I read online that sometimes the 808 cameras ship with defective USB cords (only good for charging, not for data transfer), so I bought a micro-SD card which comes with an SD card adapter that I can stick into my MacBook Air’s SD card slot — just in case.
Card cost: $18.
Finally, it works without the card adapter, but now I have it for whatever my next weird tech project will be. To just buy the micro-SD card straight with no adapter would be more like $9 (Walmart).
So, okay, I can turn on my 808 camera now, take snapshots and videos — both of which are very low quality.
Okay, this is a truly bad photo. There’s no viewfinder on this thing, so you just take your chances. But it gives you an approximate idea of the low-quality images shot by this camera (size: 1280 x 1024 pixels) and it also shows the time stamp.
Plug and play works fine on this camera. It comes up as an external drive, no problem.
But obviously, if I’m making orthomosaic (stitched or composite) images from these shots, I can’t have that timestamp appearing. After seeing some elaborate hardware hacks online by people trying to remove the timestamp on the #3 (if that’s really what model I have), I’ve determined that the easiest way to remove the timestamp will just be setting up a macro to batch crop it off in Photoshop. Less than ideal, but not the end of the world.
Except, from what I have been able to turn up so far, it looks like there is no way to have a #3 write a SYSCFG.txt file, and therefore no way to change the settings on this ultra-cheap version of the 808. Maybe there is, but the documentation for this category of device is insanely convoluted and non-existant and Chuck Lohr has seriously undertaken a positively herculean effort to organize it as an amateur. Anyway, no SYSCFG.txt file seems to mean I can’t change the mode to time-lapse, where I can snap a photo every 1 second or whatever.
So my brilliant workaround for that will be to extract still frames from a video that I will shoot when my copter is flying, with the camera pointed straight down.
On to the copter: I bought for $50CAD (before tax) a Litehawk XL from The Source (our version of Radio Shack). This video is mostly fluff, but it gives you an idea:
It had good reviews, but it’s the first RC copter I’ve ever flown and I was surprised by how hard it is to control. Out of the box, the center of gravity (CofG, I saw it abbreviated on a forum) was off, and on even minimal application of the throttle, the copter would start flying backwards. I broke the tail rotor within seconds of first flying it (or it was broken before and I didn’t realize). Fortunately there is one replacement.
Eventually, I had the bright idea to duct tape a large flat washer to the bottom. Experimenting with the best position (underneath and slightly forward of where the main rotor would be), I was eventually able to get it approximately stabilized and after a while was able to kind of get it to fly around indoors and land a little bit without breaking anything else (yet). Honestly, if I were a kid, this would be a terrible toy. And even as an adult, it’s very so so.
Waiting for good weather before I go fly it outdoors, but I suspect it will be tough. One video description says about the XL: “Shows on box its made for outdoors… But it fails hard any wind makes it fly all over the place.”
Fortunately, I don’t need it to work every time. I really just need it to work one time (or two or maybe three) so that I can make a proof of concept to pitch to a magazine for an article on the subject.
Of course, with this copter being as sensitive as it is to displacements of its CofG, velcroing on my 808 camera to the side pointing straight down causes the copter to veer off in the direction of the weight. So I counterbalanced with a washer taped on the opposite side only for my battery to run out. More experiments to be done today with a fresh charge, but that’s my initial report.
