Review: WiFi Endoscope

DO NOT PUT WIFI DEVICES UP YOUR BUM! OR ANYONE ELSE'S BUM!

Right, with that disclaimer out of the way, here's my review of the DDENDOCAM Snake Camera - a 2 metre long, endoscope style camera.

People send me the weirdest stuff to review!

Video

Here's me investigating my sink drain. Aren't you glad you read my blog, eh?

Full Twitter thread with bonus videos

Here's a less disturbing video showing beneath our floorboards. The last owners left a receipt down there - you can see just how good the focus is.

Pros

• Waterproof. So it is fine for drains.
• Large battery. I took a couple of videos and it still had plenty of charge.
• Flexible. Will go round some pretty tight bends.
• Adjustable lights. There's a little dial on the main unit so you can set the illumination.
• The diameter of the camera is 5.5mm. Small enough to squeeze through my plug hole.
• Little bag of attachments for hooking things out.
• Cheap! Currently less than £25.

The internals are... mostly battery! Looks fairly replaceable.

Cons

It doesn't use Infrared LEDs - just regular lights. That's a mixed blessing, as it lets you see the colour of your... errr... blockages...

The video frame rate is about 20FPS. Which is good enough, I guess. But I'd rather the resolution was lower so the bitrate could be higher.

Video files are huge, because it upsamples to 2560x1920. The native resolution is 640x480.

The physical unit is bare bones and a bit plasticy. A red LED to show it is charging, and green LED to show it is on. A power switch. A spin wheel for the lights. There's a micro-USB charging port - I'd have preferred USB-C. But, you can't expect much at this price-point.

Finally, the app. *sigh* Some apps are born crap. Some apps achieve crapness. Others have crapitude thrust upon them. The recommended TC WiFi app for android gets a horrific amount of 1 star reviews.

I managed to connect my phone to it, via the camera's built in 2.4GHz WiFi. But the app is a mess and hard to use. It saves photos as JPG, but with a PNG file extension. It works, and didn't crash on me.

But, for all that, you get a reasonable quality endoscopic camera with a 2 metre long hose.

Linux to the rescue!

Rather than using the app, can we connect directly to the camera? Yes! Not over USB, sadly, but your computer can join the unencrypted WiFi network it broadcasts.

The only port open on it was 8081. I couldn't connect via www or telnet. The device responded to pings. I couldn't capture any packets.

Decompiling the app showed that it uses libjh_wifi.so. The only reference I found to that is someone's attempt to reverse engineer a WiFi microscope

Thankfully, there's some open source Python code to control the camera. It works perfectly and dumps raw JPG frames out into a directory. Each one is 640x480. The unit seems to stream at about 8fps.

For those of you who found this post by keyword search, you have to send JHCMD - I presume because the camera is made by JoyHonest.

Linux users will have to remove import msvcrt and change while not msvcrt.kbhit(): to while True:.

Conclusion

A twenty-five-quid endoscope is pretty useful. Good for drains, or other weird holes in your house. 2 metres is plenty long enough for my needs - but they also sell a 5m variant.

The picture quality is fine - especially considering the price. If you can put up with the app, then this is a handy tool.

Please do not insert it into a human body.