Need a good "keychain" video camera

Insomniac · Wed Aug 10, 2011 11:40 pm

Personally, I'd recommend an #11 cam if you don't mind the extra $10 or so. It apparently doesn't suffer from the charging problem, as after I did some reading, I saw reports that the charging LED does indeed go out when it's fully charged, which never happens with the #3. Further, new #3 cams are lower in quality than older batches, and the #11's image quality is leaps and bounds ahead of the #3.

If you watch that video in my last post, you can see a comparison between the #3 and #11 near the end... Here's some footage I filmed with my #3 when I still had it... (Later lost it in a crash where recovering the aircraft was impossible)

[youtube][/youtube]

I'm kind of tempted to pick up an #11 cam myself now...

POLAND_SPUD · Thu Aug 11, 2011 12:34 am

Yeah those issues, and acceleration forces, were my concern. I'm sure it could be possibly to gut a keychain camera and fit it inside MiniBoy.

AFAIK most newer electronics (SMD) is already G hardened... most cellphones experience a couple of hundred of Gs, if not more, when dropped

Insomniac · Thu Aug 11, 2011 1:36 am

If you were going to fire a camera, my suggestion would be to open it up and coat the circuit board with epoxy... While most components are SMD, there's a few (such as the quartz oscillator) which are mounted using through-hole technology, and are more free to move around... Epoxy would help ensure nothing can move. And even so, I'd be concerned about the quartz crystal... inside the metal enclosure, the crystal looks like this, and is unsupported apart from the base. Fragile, no?

Still, modern electronics are quite resistant to being dropped, as POLAND_SPUD pointed out, so I reakon you've got a good chance of it surviving.