Sunday 12 August 2012

DoggyCam - First Trials

I mentioned some time ago that I was waiting for a camera which is made to clip on an animal's collar and hang under the chin. It arrived a while ago and has been near the top of the 'Round Tuit' pile for some time. Today I decided it was time to give it a proper test as so far I had only tried it hand held to make sure it was working OK.

2012-08-12 11.36.42

I gave it a short trial in the garden with it attached to Penny's usual house collar. It would not hang on an even keel. As as she tends to mooch around with her head down I got plenty of chin shots! This is a few extracts from that first test: (Probably best to turn the sound right down!)




For the mid-day walk I used a different collar. At first the camera fell off as we got out the front gate but refixing it made it stay in place for the rest of the walk. Also that proved the camera is rugged enough to stand a few knocks.

This is composed from some short sections from the walk. Nothing inspiring as we didn't meet anyone and too much will probably induce motion sickness in the viewer. I am pleased with the colour quality and the picture is reasonable for a standard 640x480 pixel AVI video. This short walk used just over half a gig of the 4gig built in memory. The battery is rated to last for 2.5hrs before it needs recharging and at this rate of memory usage I can see it holding  about 1.5 hrs of video which it records in 30min chunks. Just as well it is in chunks as the transfer rate to the pC is dreadfully slow.

If you don't blink at the beginning you will get a rare glimpse of the author - too much might scare the horses!




The result is fine when Penny is reasonably still but when walking there is too much motion to be comfortable watching. Should be more interesting when we meet some other dogs. What's the betting that we only meet anyone when I don't put the camera on?

6 comments:

  1. Amazing quality all things considered. Very impressive.

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  2. I looked at this late last night John and found it great fun :-) As Adrian said the quality was really good! The world from Penny's point of view, it occurred to me that had she been male we might have had lots more views of lamp posts, gate posts, etc. ;-)

    Love the video of the GSW on the previous post!

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    1. Ah. There are only two lamp posts on that walk. When we walk along the main street she does stop at every one to give it a good sniff. She may not be able to water those but she does 'water' most of the slugs and snails we meet. Her aim is amazingly accurate ;>)

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  3. I love it! you can see her tongue come out half way through the walk. Agreed much better when she stops to look around!

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    Replies
    1. Part of the problem is the light weight of the camera and the shiny collar which can slip round easily. She needs a strip of Velcro on her head to fix it in place ;)

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Thank you for visiting. Hope you enjoyed the pictures. Any comment, or correction to any information or identification I get wrong, is most welcome. John

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