FlyCamOne2 - early Xmas present to myself!

[bleakanddivine]

I know I should have waited until Christmas, but I have just bought a new toy - a FlyCamOne2, and I've just had a chance to play around with it a bit. I bought the Extreme Battery Pack with it, and a couple of Sandisk Ultra 2GB SD cards. The cards haven't arrived yet but luckily I already had a Sandisk Extreme 1GB SD card which will do for now.

First impressions - kit is beautifully presented and packaged in custom fitted MDF boxes. Manual is barely OK, with plenty of that awful literal translation gibberish which looks as if it's been fed through a tranlation program. But you can make out the gist of it.
Everything works like it says on the tin, the only problem I had is not being able to update the firmware. The instructions that come with the downloaded update file are not great and even following the link from Magnatom's article to alternative instructions I wasn't successful - only getting a message 'Unable to initialise device. Check drivers and hardware' when running the update program with the FlyCamOne connected by USB.

The Battery pack sits on the cam like this.

Mounting to the bike. I'd decided that I wanted to use the FlyCamOne as a rear-facing cam, and that I would try and attach it under the saddle somehow. I figured it would probably be safe from rain under there, and there was enough room above my Altura seat-post bag for some sort of rig-up involving velcro cable ties. I wasn't sure exactly how this would work until it arrived and I had a chance to experiment a bit.
The thing was a lot smaller than I had imagined, but I managed to create a sort of velcro cradle for it that attached itself to the velcro at the top of the Altura straps that hung from the saddle bars. Another strip of (red)velcro round the bars and cam itself and it was pretty secure. It slides rearwards out of the cradle so that the on/off switches on the side can be accessed, then it is pulled back into the cradle by its lanyard, which is then secured by velcro round the seat post. Sounds pretty botchy, but it is actually pretty solid, and it can also be removed or mounted quite quickly by releasing the seat-post velcro and sliding it out rearwards. Here's a couple of photos of the mounting.

The only problem is that it can get a bit wonky when putting it in, so verticals are not necessarily true on the resulting pictures, but it's liveable with. I took it for a quick spin round the block and the results are here.

http://www.stealingdan.co.uk/bikecam/bikecam1.wmv (big file)

This is a file that I imported into WMV, clipped the ends of, had to rotate 180 degrees, and saved at 2.1Mbps. It's about 37Mb. The original was about 153Mb but upside down, so very hard to watch. I can put the smaller file up on Youtube if anyone wants, but the quality will be worse.

Not too bad, bumps in the road not withstanding, and you can read the nearside car plates if you pause the clip. No idea yet on battery life, SD card capacity etc. All in all pretty good for about £90 all in.

Jonathan

 

[HLaB]

Good review. I quite fancied one because of it size but I was unsure of how it'd be mounted, so I opted for an ATC 5K. Its a Christmas pressie so after I tested, I had to give it back till then, I can't wait.

 

[bleakanddivine]

Weather turned today, raw and blustery, but as the 2GB SD cards had arrived this morning I felt obliged, in the interests of err.. research, to take the FlyCamOne out on a longer ride. The light was getting pretty dim by the time I got back, but at least I beat the rain by a few minutes.

Putting the cam on and off the bike was a breeze, just took a minute or so, as I had left the velcro cradle in place. It was just a question of sliding the cam in and securing the lanyard round the seat-post with velcro. This was a bit of a relief as taking five or ten minutes to set it up each time would be a big disincentive to using it.
And this time I remembered to make the right sequence of button presses to invert the recorded image, and set it on loop recording. Normally you would stand the cam up on its end and the lens would look out forwards from the top of the flat front. But the lens can be rotated about 90 degrees backwards, so that you can lie the cam down on its flat back and the lens then looks out from the cue end of the thing. Doing this effectively makes the recorded image upside down so there is a setting to tell it to record upside down so the image is the right way up when you view it. This also turns the little LCD display upside down as well which is a nice touch.

Using the VE (Video-Endless) setting the device would continue recording when the SD card was full, overwriting the earlier recording from the start. In fact the trip used 1.78GB out of a possible 1.89GB, ie about 95% capacity, so this feature didn't come into play this time. The recording was 46 minutes, so the full card capacity could be around 48 minutes.

When I got back I hooked the cam up to the PC and downloaded the video. I was surprised to find that for some reason the cam had cut the recording into 2 avi files, one of 991kb (25 minutes) and the remainding time 881kb (21 minutes). I don't think I did anything to trigger this, as the changeover seems to be while I was happily cycling along?? Could be some inherent limitation? At least it carried on recording and didn't just stop.

The 2 files took over half an hour to download so I went and had a shower. I might try a card reader next time and see if that is any quicker.

The image quality is pretty impressive I reckon. Parked car number plates can usually be made out, those of overtakers not quite so often, possibly because they are closer to the edge of the lens, also probably because they are moving. There's also some variation of light/darkness in the recording. I haven't worked out yet whether this is just the result of the sun going in and out (not that there was any sun about today) or the effect of say going under/past large trees/buildings, or the cam automatically adjusting when the view was filled with sky rather than scenery.

I could post the clips somewhere on youtube, but to be honest I don't expect anybody to delight in 3/4 hr of pretty uneventful biking around Harrow, although it is quite interesting to see a rearward view of your own ride for once.

Jonathan

 

[downfader]

Thats pretty good quality I have to say. I reckon with a bit of sewing you could make a decent mount in no time and just slip it in and out (oo-er)

 

[bleakanddivine]

Here's some more detail on how the cam is mounted.

I first made up a sort of 'harness' from velcro cable ties - think of a sort of small, black hairy 'thong' for the device. Top left here:

The cam slides into this and the lanyard is to hand at the back to secure to the seat-post.

The thing is mounted on the bike facing rearwards between the parallel under-saddle seat bars by a longer velcro tie around this whole package and the bars. If you put them with the right sides of the velcro together, the harness and the tie interlock and hold it in place firmly.

Jonathan

 

[col]

Very impressive picture quality,i was just wondering about the sort of jerky effect nearer the back third of the film? But very impressive,especially at that price.

 

[bleakanddivine]

The jerkiness is a telling indictment of the less than runway-like quality of the road surface in these parts. i.e it's pothole boiiings transmitted up to the cam.

For some reason (cable TV?) many of the main and side roads have had bands of foot-wide trenches dug across them that have been back-filled and tarmacced over, and which have then settled and sunk up to an inch or so relative to the rest of the road. Plus general disintegration of the surface, breaking up around manholes and drains, joins between tarmac sections of differing heights etc. I've also run over the odd nappy sack (full), dead rat, dead squirrel, scrubbing brush, tube of toothpaste, carton of milk, etc but not on that run. Cycling is definitely not a smooth experience at times.

Jonathan

 

[col]

I see, i was aware of the bad road surface,but didnt see the effect it had other than just a bumpy picture.still a great picture though.

 

[bleakanddivine]

Here is how the Video looping function ('endless video') of the FlyCam seems to me to work.

Whatever the size of the remaining free memory on the card is, that is divided into 2 halves.

The device records one video clip into the first half of the space, and saves it as, say, pic01.avi. It then records into the second half of the free space, and saves that as pic02.avi. It then writes over the pic01.avi file on the first half of the space with the next clip, pic03.avi, then writes over the pic03.avi file on the second half of the space with the next clip, pic04.avi,and so on.

So an empty 2GB card will be divided into 2 halves holding about 1GB (say 20 minutes) each. When endless video mode is stopped, there will be 2 files on the card, one of 1GB with a full 20 minutes or so of recording, and one smaller one with the remaining time since the last full 1GB clip was saved.

EG a trip of 70 minutes could be divided up into clips like this:

pic01.avi (1st 20 mins) - deleted
pic02.avi (2nd 20 mins) - deleted
pic03.avi (3rd 20 mins) - saved over pic01.avi
pic04.avi (last 10 mins) - saved over pic02.avi

So rather than always having the last 40 minutes recorded, you can end up with anything between the last 21 and 39 minutes recorded.

If you want a straight recording of the max of about 40+ mins, you need to use the normal non-endless video mode and you'll just lose anything after the card is full.

Jonathan

 

[bleakanddivine]

Had a go with the Flycam front-facing today.

There's a lamp bracket on the right front fork on which I thought I could probably rig up some sort of velcro attachment for the cam. Works pretty well, seems a bit more solid than the under-saddle method for rear-facing. The bracket has an aperture in, through which one of the velcro straps goes, to secure it from jumping up and off.

It's a much more exposed position than under-saddle, so it's a strictly dry weather arrangement. One advantage is that the stop/start buttons and LCD display are much more accessible.

Jonathan