Another key-chain camera hack

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  2012-10-15  |     |    11 Comments

We discovered a new key-chain video camera which is called the 808#16. It had gotten a pretty good review so we decided to give the video camera add-on hack yet another try. A while ago we tried it with a 808#14 but it didn’t work that well when we where running it directly from the Crazyflie battery. It shut down as soon as we used to much throttle and using a separate battery made it to heavy. We didn’t have to high hopes for the 808#16 either and when we discovered that the bare camera weight, no battery nor case, was about 9g we knew it would be at the maximum of what the Crazyflie could carry.  With high hopes we connected the camera directly to the Crazyflie battery terminal and gave it a try.

It worked! The camera didn’t shut down but as you can see the stability is pretty bad during take-off. Once in the air it is controllable but only barely. We haven’t tested the full flight time but it probably wont be more then 2-3 minutes. We are thinking of doing a test where we add 4 more motors “mirrored” directly underneath the existing ones to increase the payload capability. Would be nice to have that option and it should be fairly simple to do.

We are pretty impressed with the video of the 808#16 which still is very cheap. We bought the 808#16 camera with the D-lens which is a wide angle lens and that’s why the video has a bit of a fish-eye.

11 comments on “Another key-chain camera hack”

  • >add 4 more motors “mirrored” directly underneath the existing

    Wow that’s cool. To make this hack you need to solder new more powerful motor transistors instead of exisiting ones? Would users be able to do that hack?

    • Well as we have not tried it yet we don’t really know how well it is going to work but in theory the system should be able to handle it. We would have to make a new motor mount that fits two motors, which could be ordered from e.g. Shapeways or printed at home if you are lucky having a good 3D printer. The battery would also have to be bigger but the potential payload capability should increase with about 10-20g with an added weight of 10-12g. Also some sort of landing gear would have to be added to gain clearance from the inverted motor with propeller but that we already have prepared for on the PCB.

  • oh wow, the vid there is surprisingly good quality from a keychain camera.
    I’m going to have to get me one of those.
    maybe you can find a way to lighten it, use the same camera with a purpose made board.

  • where you managing to stream this or just save it to SD card and look at it after?

    • wow. this together with the crazyfly would be perfect. does anybody know if this could be working?

  • @Marc – thanks for providing those links! I have my crazyflie on preorder and as it stands I have plenty of time to look into the best solution for a nano cam+video transmitter hack. You links are a great starting point and if I find some lighter/better overall solutions I’ll be sure to come back here and post up.

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