On-Board Camera

[gr8tfuldead]

Has anyone put an onboard camera in their trains? I have one and am trying to figure out the best way to do it with the least amount of modification to the engine. The other tricky part is fitting the 9 volt battery with the lens in one unit as the cable connecting them is stiff and would derail the train if they were each in a separate unit. I'm open to any suggestions.

[Guest ___]

We have two that we run on the club layout. We had a thread about this some where. I'm just in the door from Osaka and a 12 hour flight so I'm too zonked to look for it right now. If no one else finds it, maybe Jeff with chime in on this.

[cteno4]

the larger camera units need to go on a flatbed and get pushed around. there are some smaller units like the TC-9 by RF Labs that were small enough to go inside a train. one of our members got his into one of his trains (cant remember with, but it was like a resort with a large forward window to give enough room). the nice thing about this unit is it has a small rechargeable battery that will last like 20 minutes and gets recharged from track power. down side is i dont think its in production anymore. RF system was playing with doing train cams for a while, but think they are now focusing on their high end cameras for scientific needs...

 

there are a number of small and cheap cameras available out there, but most are just a tad big to fit inside most japanese trains. the pc boards need to be ground down to fit in and unfortunately the camera part is glued right in the center of this.

 

for replacing the 9v battery there are a number of small nimh and lithium ion rechargeable batteries you could use in replace of the 9v battery to make something smaller. you could even make a more flexible cable to run this between two cars and have the batteries in a second car or even have two of the second battery cars that you could swap out while one was charging.

 

one downside is that you will get some flickering of the signal due to some RF interference you will get while running the train around. locating your receiver in the center of the layout does help some. i remember someone recently on another board posting that they were able to get rid of a lot of the interference somehow.

 

tomix has a super slick system that sends the video signal over the rails and uses the CL hf power to power the camera. downside is you need to use the tomix CF transformers to use it and it aint cheap!

 

cheers

 

jeff