This is the TS004 Thermal Monocular:

Let's put it through its paces!

Hardware

This is a chunky bit of kit and fits nicely in the hand. It's well weighted and feels sturdy.

The rubber seal fits tightly around your eye and is excellent at keeping light out. The screen is set a little way back, so is easy to focus on. Taking a photo of the screen itself was a little tricky - here's what you can expect to see when using the settings menu:

The focus knob near the viewfinder is a little stiff, but it turns silently.

There's a rubber lens cover which is attached and can be easily tucked away next to the standard tripod mount. It comes with a lanyard strap, so you're unlikely to drop it. The buttons are well spaced and respond quickly.

The USB-C port has a rubber flap to keep out moisture.

OK, let's take some snaps!

Photos

Photo quality is pretty good - although limited by the technology behind the thermal sensor. The TS004 has a thermal resolution of 256x192 and images are upscaled to 640x480.

One thing to note, the user-interface is burned in to the photos. So if you want the battery display on screen, it will also appear on the photo. Similarly, things like the range-finder appear in the image.

There's a reasonable AI built in. It is designed to tell you what sort of wildlife you've spotted. In some cases, it is pretty accurate! A woman walked by me while I was looking for wildlife - here's her photo:

Nifty!

Here's a photo of a fox:

There are remarkably few wild boars in London!

Video

Video is also 640x480. It is a very smooth 42.187 FPS and a rather chunky 2,162 Kbps - leading to a file size of around 20MB per minute. With around 30GB of in-built storage, that shouldn't be a problem though. There's no audio available and, just like the photos, the UI is burned into the picture.

Here are a couple of sample videos I shot. In them, I cycle through the colour modes and zoom levels.

First, an urban fox foraging in London:

Second, some parakeets flapping around a tree:

I'm impressed with the smoothness of the video and how well it picks up heat even from relatively far away.

Linux

Bizarrely, on Linux it shows up as 1d6b:0101 Linux Foundation Audio Gadget. It presents as a standard USB drive and you can easily copy files to and from it. 100% compatibility!

You can't use it as a WebCam - for anything more complicated than copying files, you need to use the official app.

App

The TopInfrared App for Android is reasonably good. It connects to the camera via WiFi and offers some useful features. Most impressively, it live-streams the camera's view to your phone.

From there you can take photos or videos and have them saved straight onto your device. Handy if you've set the camera up outside and want to view it from somewhere warmer.

Frustratingly, it isn't possible to set all the options on the camera using the app. For that you need to go back to the menu on the camera - which is slightly laborious.

The app isn't mandatory for most operations - thankfully - but it is the only way to set the time and date on the monocular. You will also need it if there are any firmware updates.

If you don't need the app, you can turn off the WiFi to save some battery life.

Drawbacks

The device works - and is great for wildlife spotting - but there are a few little niggles. I've fed these back to the manufacturer and have included their responses.

• There's no EXIF in the photos, or any way to get thermal data out of the images.

  • "These products focus on image clarity, high sensitivity, and low latency. For example, temperature-measurement thermal cameras typically run at 25 Hz, while the TS004 operates at 50 Hz for smoother viewing. Devices that include EXIF temperature data, raw thermal export, and analytical tools are measurement-focused thermal cameras, which are based on a different design and use case."

• As mentioned, having the UI burned into the photos and videos is slightly annoying.

  • You can turn off the UI elements on screen which stops them appearing in the photo.

• The range-finder only works in yards and, while seemingly accurate, isn't overly helpful to those of us who think in metric!

  • "Unit switching will be available in the March firmware update"

• Once you sync the time with the monocular, all the filenames are timestamped like 2026_02_09_12345678 but it appears to be hardwired to Hong Kong Time (UTC+8) - so your dates and times might be a little out.

  • "We will investigate it and see if it can be implemented in a future update"

• The AI detection feature doesn't seem particularly tuned for the UK.

  • "Due to hardware limitations, the current recognition is relatively basic, so there is limited room for significant improvement"

In terms of hardware limitations, there's no GPS. I would expect a device in this price-range to have basic GPS functionality to allow you to easily tag photos.

None of these are show-stoppers, but for a device this expensive they are an annoyance.

Price

OK, so you want to spot birds in trees and wild boars foraging in the forest - what'll this cost you?

Close to £400 - you can use code TERENCE15 for a 15% discount until 16 February 2026.

The price of thermal imaging equipment is high and this is a fairly niche form-factor. It is easy to use, has a great range, and the rubber eyepiece is much nicer than staring at a bright phone screen. The battery life is excellent and you certainly can't complain about the generous storage space.

There are some minor irritations as discussed above, but it is an exceptional bit of kit if you like to explore the environment. Are you going to spot any cryptids with it? Who knows! But you'll have lots of fun discovering the natural world around you.

It's smaller than a normal USB stick and barely weighs anything. Shove the USB-C protrusion into your Android phone, launch the app, and... nope - that's it! Pretty much instantly plug and play.

There's also a reasonably long USB-C extension cable, so you can poke the camera in small places without needing to get your phone up close to something hot. But, if you do want to get close, the magnetic cover acts as a macro lens. Perfect for seeing which capacitor on your motherboard is about to blow!

Image Quality

The IR lens is only 256x192. It doesn't sound like a lot, but that's quite high spec for these sort of consumer devices. Everything is upscaled - and there's an overlay to show you the temperatures. Here's my face - what a cold nose!

There's no IR EXIF, sadly, but you do get GPS.

Video

The video is upscaled to 1080x1440 - which allows for the information overlay to be a sensible size. Frame rate is about 11fps - but we're not going for cinematic quality here! Codec is h264 but fairly uncompressed.

There doesn't seem to be a way to get rid of the InfiRay watermark - but perhaps it is burried in the app settings somewhere?

App

The Android app is spartan, but functional. You can fiddle around with the camera's colour pallets, play with some image and video quality settings, and record video.

It's also possible to show your phone's camera simultaneously with the thermal image - so you can get an idea of what you're seeing.

Linux Nerds

The camera shows up as 0bda:5830 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. USB Camera and is automatically recognised as a USB camera.

The only issue is with the way it presents itself. Opening up Google Meet shows the image split like this:

No idea what's going on there! But it should be easy enough to stream from the camera and post-process it.

Price

Now, here's the rub. What with the global chip shortages and the need for IR sensors in military equipment, the price of these devices is unfairly high.

The price on Amazon is around £220 - use the code terence12 to get a discount. That's a chunk of change! But these cameras are useful if you want to check for leaks, or dodgy insulation, or whether your computer is overheating.

You can also buy from the official website.

I've reviewed several IR cameras. The P2 Pro is a great gadget. It's small, the app doesn't suck, and it seems pretty accurate.

It's a bargain if a group of you are buying it for a hack-lab.

Most laptops have pathetic 720p webcams built in. Which is weird, because even the most basic smartphone has a front-facing camera capable of 4K photos. Some can even do 4K video.

The good folks at INDMEM have sent me a 1440p (2K) webcam to review. For under £30, they claim that it's even better than the 1080p USB cameras available at that price point. Let's take it for a spin!

Product Shots

Spec

• 2560 x 1440 output (5 Megapixel)
• Focus - auto and manual
• USB 2 connector with 2 metre lead
• 110° wide angle lens
• Microphone with noise cancelling
• Lens cover - stick on
• h264 encoding

Quality and Comparison

I placed the USB camera just above my laptop's webcam. I took these shots one after the other. My wall has a bunch of albums on it - so is reasonably good for seeing how much detail the camera picks up and how much noise it introduces.

Click for full size.

2K webcam

720p laptop

Thoughts

There's definitely more detail in the 2K webcam. But my laptop has a much wider field of view. That's not hugely important for video conferencing.

By default, I found the webcam to be slightly overexposed - but I was able to adjust that in software.

It's worth noting that the 1080p and 720p formats are just centre cut-outs of the main full frame. That is, the resolution isn't scaled and then trimmed, it literally just takes a 1920x1080 cut from the centre of the frame! The 640x480 is a scaled down version of the full frame.

But, here's the kicker. The full frame image is 2592x1944. That's larger than the advertised resolution!

Audio

There are two microphones grilles on either side of the device - but there's only one microphone. More on that later. Only a mono audio feed is outputted. Sound was a touch on the quiet side, but that can be boosted in software.

Linux Compatibility

As with most webcams, it's just plug 'n' play. The latest version of Ubuntu detected it without hassle. It shows up as: 0c45:6366 Microdia USB 2.0 Camera.

That's a Sonix Technology Co. Ltd device, and it does correctly advertise a 2592x1944 resolution as both JPEG and video/x-raw YUY2.

Both Cheese and VLC detected the highest possible resolution - albeit only at 15fps for motion JPG. Using guvcview I was able to control the focus - either manually or auto - as well as being able to adjust the exposure.

Is it true 2K?

Earlier this year, I reviewed a WiFi Endoscope. That claimed to be 2560×1920, but the native resolution was 640×480. That's pretty common in cheap cameras - use a low-end sensor, upscale in software, and sell to people who only buy on specification inflation.

In this case, as far as I can tell, the camera is better than 2K! It picks out much more detail than my 720p camera, and has variable focus.

Limitations

Some video chat services, like Google Meet, only go up to 720p. I couldn't find any which went above 1080p. Even getUserMedia wouldn't go higher than that in the browser.

At the highest resolution, it's limited to 15fps using MJPEG. And only 2fps on RAW video. The camera claims to have an h264 stream, but I couldn't access it on Linux or Mac. At 1080p, you get 30fps.

Let's crack it open!

The cover is held on with a few dabs of glue. A quick spludger and it is open.

Here's a close up of the PCB. DH-48-02 V2.0 No markings on a camera module.

The microphone module appears to be 4R12 5W60.

Let's flip it over! USB soldered in. Sometimes these have connectors. Unpopulated space in the lower left. A closer look at the brains shows they are a SONIX SN9C5256AJG and a Boyamicro BY25D80AS TIG 2022

Verdict

So, to sum up…

• This camera claims to be 2K / 1440p. But it is actually 2592x1944! Much better than advertised.
• The mono mic is a bit quiet.
• Has auto / controllable focus and aperture.

All for less than £30!

The webcam cover is handy - you can easily see if the lens is open. The clip is well designed for hanging off the top of a laptop or monitor.

The lens makes a satisfying and audible click as it snaps into focus. And the optics are - for a cheap camera - great.

You're not going to be able to make use of all the pixels on a virtual pub quiz, but this is a cracking bit of kit for £26.

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?

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.

The design is gorgeous - and award winning. It's a sleek unit and, surprisingly, feels nice in the hand.

It can store videos on an SD card (not included) or via the cloud. The app - which is pretty nice - also lets you view the camera when you're away from home.

Let's tear straight into it!

Unboxing

Standard image

Night Mode

In low light, the Infrared LEDs turn on. Night mode works pretty well.

Video

This is the video quality when streamed from Android.

App

One really nice touch is the way it handles WiFi sign on. The app generates a QR code - hold it in front of the camera, and it automagically connects.

There's an in-app tutorial when you boot up. It's all pretty self-explanatory. Swipe the screen to move the camera.

There's a range of options where you can play with motion tracking. You also receive alerts when it detects motion.

Finally, there's 2-way audio support. You can hear what's going on in the vicinity - although it's fairly low quality mono feed. You can tap a button on the app and broadcast your voice to the camera. Good for scaring off burglars.

Cloud Services

I have mixed feelings about this. €170 per year feels a bit much - but it depends on what price you place on security. Hopefully that price includes regular firmware updates. If you don't want to pay that price, you can record videos to the local SD card. There's no option to specify your own server, sadly.

Security

Whenever you invite a 3rd party into your home, you place trust in their security. The Nooie has a sensibly written privacy policy and ToS. All data is stored on AWS, rather than a Windows Vista box under a developer's desk in China. All the connections to AWS were correctly secured, as far as I could tell.

The camera doesn't respond to common port scans.

The first thing the app asked me to do was update the firmware - which removed the FTP Daemon to increase security.

There's no 2FA on the app - but that may be overkill for a consumer device. It does let you create guest accounts, so your household don't have to share a single password.

This isn't a full and formal analysis of the product - but it is a hell of a lot better than the security on most IP cameras.

Final Thoughts

It's a good looking camera. The video and audio quality are fine - but nothing special. Two way audio is handy. Firmware updates and cloud functionality really round off the package. All-in-all, it's excellent value for money.

Discount Code

Save 10% on Nooie Cam 360 & get one month of Nooie Cloud service for free. Available from 27th April to 30th April. Discount code: NOOIEMAR

Buy the Nooie 360 WiFi camera on Amazon.

Tech Specs

Before we dive in to the photos and videos, let's see how they compare on raw numbers.

Photo

By default photos are 3040*1520 and taken in spherical format. The average photo size is about 1.5MB. They look like this: (click for full-size)

There's very little metadata included, aside from a mysterious comment.

There's an option in the app to export the photo in equirectangular format.

The exported version looks like this:

As you can see, the stitching isn't perfect, but that's sadly common on all cameras like this. Filesize is about 2.1MB.

Here's the same photo taken by the LG 360. It's 5660*2830 and 4.5MB.

Comparison

The PowerAdd has lower resolution, that's obvious. But when viewed on a phone screen, it doesn't make much difference. Stitching needs improving, but it isn't noticeably worse than the LG.

The app is annoying to use - more on that in a bit - you have to download the side-by-side file into the app, then find the photo in your gallery, then share it, which then converts it to an equirectangular photosphere. A little cumbersome.

Video

Video quality is adequate. As you can see here, it is a bit blurry and suffers under low light.

Sound is stereo. The LG has full 5.1 and spatial audio - which is more suitable for use on VR. But the PowerAdd captures voices perfectly well.

Just like the photos, the raw video is side-by-side. Filesize is about 1MB per minute when copied directly from the SD card. You can use the app to trim the video and export to to 360 format. Once stitched together by the software, the filesize doubles to about 2MB per minute.

Interestingly, the LG will only record for a maximum of 20 minutes, the PowerAdd will go for 80 minutes at a time.

Physical Size

The PowerAdd is significantly bigger and heavier. That doesn't bother me. If anything, it feels sturdier in the hand than the lightweight LG. The PowerAdd's can only take 128GB cards - but that's tempered by the fact that larger cards are rare and exorbitantly expensive.

The bigger battery is a real boost - although it is hard to measure it in the real world.

The LG comes with a plastic protective cover for the lenses - you get nothing with the PowerAdd. Worth investing in a soft or hard case to protect its eyes.

Connectivity

Both cameras have their ports at the bottom.

The LG has a stupid flap protecting the ports which means you can't charge it and have it connected with a tripod. The PowerAdd uses the older micro-USB connector, that is a shame. I'd have hoped in 2017 that all new electronics would use USB-C.

The PowerAdd will let you transfer files by USB. You can also take the SD card out and transfer them directly. No different to the LG in that respect.

The PowerAdd, like the LG, uses WiFi to connect to the app and transfer files. The speed on both is about the same in terms of raw throughput - but the PowerAdd's files are much smaller, so they transfer quicker.

Lights, Camera, Action!

The PowerAdd is festooned with blue LEDs. They are bright and dotted around the body.

This one lets you know that the power is on:

These let you know that the WiFi is on, and whether the unit is in photo of video mode:

The lights are a bit bright, but they're more noticeable than the LG's which hide them on the side.

One annoying thing is the buzzer on the PowerAdd. It is only capable of beeping. It's a piercing, shrieking, loud and unpleasant sound. It goes off when the unit is switch on, when the WiFi is turned on, when a photo is taken. It's just grim. There's no option in the app to turn it off.

Buttons

You get power, wifi, camera/video toggle, and a shutter thumb button.

I'd have preferred them to be physical switches rather than buttons. You have to hold them down for a little while to get the functionality to change.

The shutter button is curious. After pressing it there is a short delay, and then the wretched beeper lets you know that a photo has been captured.

The App

I found the LG's app to be confusing and unreliable. The PowerAdd's app is also disappointing. For some reason it starts upside down! There are also a few error messages which remain untranslated from Chinese. As with the LG, you have to manually connect to the camera's WiFi, only then can you use the app.

The basic interface is fine. You see what the camera sees, tap the screen to take a photo or fiddle with the settings.

For basic configuration, the app is adequate. You can adjust all sorts of settings.

You have to download the photos, then convert them to equirectangular format, then upload or share them. A little cumbersome.

A few other oddities. There's no ability to stream directly to YouTube or Facebook. It seems that the timezone is set to China time - there's no way to edit that. GPS isn't included in the unit - so you don't get geotagged photos.

OEM

The app does give us some clues as to the origin of the camera. I think it is made by URBETTER a Chinese OEM. Which, with a bit of sleuthing, takes us to a product called Halwel IDV720.

According to that, the image sensor is the OV4689 - they should be capable of recording video at 2688x1520 up to 120fps. I wonder if it is intentionally slowed due to the 550MHz processor, and the need to instantly write to an SD card?

The stitching software used to create the equirectangular image is provided by "MiTong Technology".

It should be possible to use the apps designed for other IDV720 cameras - but they all get terrible reviews.

USB

The app will allow you to switch from WiFi to USB connectivity. So, theoretically, you should be able to plug this into a regular PC and stream video and audio directly.

A quick lsusb gives us 18d1:0003 Google Inc. that's rather cheeky! It's masquerading as a basic Android device. It shows up as a simple SD card reader, so you can pull files from the DCIM folder.

I couldn't work out how to stream video from it though.

Firmware

Grrrr! This is very disappointing. The latest firmware can be downloaded over http, with no security, from a computer in Shenzen, running Windows 7 Ultimate Edition Service Pack 1!

The firmware is unencrypted and a quick binwalk shows that it is running Linux! Hurrah. But PowerAdd really need to secure their software update process and comply with the GPL.

There's no changelog included, so there's no way of knowing what the software has fixed.

Conclusion

Once again we see technology fall rapidly in price as Chinese OEMs race to replicate premium hardware.

For ninety-quid, this is a perfectly decent 360 camera. The resolution is lower than the competitors, but it makes up for it with a longer battery life.

The software is disappointing. It just about does the basics - simple configuration and photo management - but it lacks the finesse of the LG app. The constant beeping from the PowerAdd is also annoying.

Buy the PowerAdd 360 from Amazon UK for £89.99.

This an excellent bit of kit. Easy to use, impressive results, and an app which works pretty well.

A single click button to take photos and videos, recording audio in surround sound, and perfect for uploading to Facebook or YouTube.

Unlike most of the kit I review, I paid for this myself. I have no hesitation in recommending it to anyone who wants to get started in spherical photography.

You can find the tech specs yourself - I'm going to show you a few of the photos and then tell you why you shouldn't buy it.

Sample Shots

This is what a "raw" equirectangular image looks like. Click for MASSIVE. If you zoom in, you can tell exactly where the stitching is. It's pretty good - but not seamless.

Design Flaws

The camera is not perfect, I'll start by talking about the things which show this is a V1 product.

Charging Flap

On the base of the unit is a flap - it covers the USB charging port and the microSD slot. With the flap open, you can't use the tripod. 

Or, to put it a different way, you have to take off the tripod every time you want to charge it.

USB Connection

I like the fact it uses the newer USB-C standard. But it appears that the camera can only be charged over USB, you can't transfer files from it. When plugged into a computer, it doesn't show as a USB drive. The only way to get photos and videos off is over WiFi using the app. WiFi transfers pretty quickly, but you end up going camera to phone to laptop if you want to edit anything.

No Live Streaming

The camera streams video direct to the handset over WiFi, but there's no way to put that on YouTube or Facebook directly.

There are some hacky workarounds

No Built-in GPS

Photos do have GPS EXIF - but the location is that of your phone. That's fine if you're holding both, but if you put the camera somewhere then get out of shot, the location will represent your position, not the camera's. 

Password Protection and WiFi Connectivity

When you first connect to the camera, it prompts you to change the default WiFi password. A brilliant idea! 

But it doesn't actually work. I repeatedly tried changing the password, to no effect. 

WiFi can be a little hard to manage. Your phone connects to the camera - but some phones will complain that there is no Internet connection, and will disconnect. It sometimes takes some manual clicking around the options to get connected. 

Even then, the connection can be spotty. Move too far away and the live video feed from the camera stops. The camera still took photos and videos, but the preview stopped. The range seemed to be about 5 metres.

Verdict

I'm being overly harsh on such a cheap product. For quick snaps or full videos, it's incredibly good.

The app is decent - not always a given with hardware. Plenty of options to fiddle with and relatively quick to use.

For around £150 it is excellent. Hold it high above your head and create some gorgeous images.

You can buy the LG 360 from Amazon UK

It looks a little like a Microsoft Kinect - a single bar with two embedded cameras. The camera resolution is 720p on each lens.

It clips on easily to a phone via a padded screw clamp. You need to install a dedicate 3D camera app in order to make it work. In the box you get the camera, two USB-OTG cables, a tripod and clamp, and a carrying pouch.

Let's take it for a spin!

Sample shots

Video

As you can see, the 3D effect is prominent.

Video quality is 2560x720. Framerate is variable depending on how fast your phone is. My Nexus 6 managed just 16fps, my S6 got to the slightly better 25fps.

Because the cameras are independent, their exposure and white balance aren't linked. This also means that occasionally one camera may drop a frame or exhibit tearing - while the other side remains unaffected.

The cameras work best in bright light. Too much motion and the JPEG encoding can't keep up. You can stream raw YUYV video off the device - but you need to either lower the framerate or resolution if you want the USB bandwidth to be sufficient.

Audio is aac, 44100 Hz, mono, fltp, 67 kb/s You don't get stereo sound, which is a little bit of a disappointment. There are no microphones in the unit - audio comes from your phone's mic. I've removed the audio from the above videos

3D metadata isn't embedded - this is needed for sites like YouTube to recognise them as 3D videos.

TV Playback

I uploaded a sample video to YouTube - which has native 3D support. I was able to stream the video to my smart TV and watch it using 3D glasses.

Photo

The Svpro app doesn't let you take photos! A bizarre omission. I cheated and used the phone's screenshot tool to capture these. Click for full size.

App

Android doesn't natively support external cameras - so you need to download the Svpro app. It's basic - you can record video and play video. That's it!

No photo capabilities, no resolution or quality settings, no framerate control, no video editing or upload to YouTube.

Worse, the app in the Google Play Store doesn't support Android 7.0 - you need to download it directly from http://www.svpro.cc/app/.

I found that the app would not keep the screen on while I was recording. You may need to adjust your phone's display settings if you want to keep the screen active.

On the positive side, it doesn't ask for crazy permissions - although you will need to grant it USB access.

There are other apps on the play store which you can use, which show how good the Svpro app could be. For example, this is USB Dual Camera:

That's not a perfect app, but it gives you an idea of the potential.

The Svpro app also seems quite slow - which sometimes leads to disappointing video results.

Raspberry Pi Linux support

Although this camera isn't advertised as working on Linux, it is a USB camera - and it works brilliantly!

Running lsusb gives us:

Bus 001 Device 004: ID 1a40:0101 Terminus Technology Inc. 4-Port HUB
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 0ac8:9902 Z-Star Microelectronics Corp.
Bus 001 Device 006: ID 0ac8:9901 Z-Star Microelectronics Corp.

So this is a USB hub with two cameras attached to it! It shows up as /dev/video0 and /dev/video1 - and both cameras work perfectly!

It supports YUV 4:2:2 (YUYV) and MJPG for video capture and, pleasingly, each camera is 1280*720 native. No interpolation!

The Raspberry Pi website has a quick tutorial on capturing images.

You can capture the MJPG directly from the camera. This is the quickest and most efficient way to get 25fps video out of the device - although the filesize is rather large (5MB per second).

avconv -f video4linux2 -input_format mjpeg -i /dev/video0 -t 00:00:05 -c:v copy output.mkv

That will only capture from one of the twin cameras. How do we get both? Here's a lazy way to capture dual USB cameras simultaneously.

avconv -f video4linux2 -input_format mjpeg -i /dev/video0 -t 00:00:05 -c:v copy outputL.mkv & avconv -f video4linux2 -input_format mjpeg -i /dev/video1 -t 00:00:05 -c:v copy outputR.mkv

That worked on my Pi 2 Model B - I'll write a blog post soon explaining other ways to do this.

Technology

At the start of the decade, my mate Ket was building his own 3D cameras. Literally two cameras wired together and mounted next to each other.

It's incredible to think how quickly technology has progressed. For £65 you get a lightweight (50g) and tiny (92mm * 20mm * 20mm) camera pairing. The distance between the cameras is almost identical to the distance between my pupils. The view angle on each lens is 100°. Perfect for stereoscopic viewing.

But pushing all that video over a USB cable is tough. A more practical design may be to place the video processing within the unit - rather than relying on the USB bandwidth and phone speed being sufficient.

Downsides

There are a few little niggles with the Svpro.

• For phones, it is Android only. At the moment the USB OTG functionality only works with Android. So you iPhone users are out of luck.
• Dedicated Android app needed. An app like this needs to be polished, professional, and a joy to use. It isn't.
• 720p is fine for a cheap camera - and matches the resolution of most 3D displays - but a bigger resolution would be welcome.
• Framerate should be higher - although this is partially a limitation of the speed of the USB transfer and of your phone.
• No binaural sound. Audio is recorded from your phone's microphone, so there's no stereo effect.

Those are minor problems. The only other issue I found was that on some devices, it would capture BGR video - the red and blue channels swapped around. Which gave this weird effect: No idea why - I reported it to Svpro and they're looking into it.

To correct it using Linux requires ffmpeg's filter colorchannelmixer

ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -vf colorchannelmixer=rr=0:rb=1:br=1:bb=0 -acodec copy out.mp4

Recording from the Pi didn't exhibit these problems.

Buy it

If you want to get started with a 3D VR Camera - for playback on a Google Cardboard or other VR headset - this is a pretty good device. The app is basic, but the video quality is satisfactory if your phone is fast enough. The 3D effect is perfect. It's also a handy way to add stereo-vision to a Raspberry Pi robotics project.

• The 3D camera is available on Amazon UK for £65.
• You can also get it direct from the manufacturer for around $80.

TO THE SCREWDRIVERS, ROBIN!

The Sercomm RC8230 is remarkably easy to open. Behind 4 rubber stopper are regular cross-head screws.

The shell comes off with some light pressure - no clips!

The microphone at the front is connected via a basic pin connector. A gently tug on the plastic port and it comes off.

Just above the camera is the horizontal movement motor (the vertical one is inside the gimbal.)

I undid the four larger screws around the black gimbal. It lifts off easily - that's when I saw the problem...

The motor should probably be attached, no?

It would appear that the constant motion of the motor had caused the plastic to shear. As we can see from this image of the camera gimbal.

The stepper motor was unplugged and removed - it'll find its way into a Raspbery Pi project at some point! But now the camera was swinging loose. How to keep it still?

BluTak! Second only in usefulness to Gaffer Tape :-) The camera was reassembled - although sadly restricted just to vertical motion.

Before putting it back into service, I noticed something interesting on the motherboard of the camera:

That WiFi module is... USB! It's a dual antenna system just plugged into a standard board.

I removed the foam padding and pulled it out carefully - without damaging the wire antennae.

Only one thing to do - plug it in to a laptop!

It's a "Ralink Technology, Corp. RT3072 Wireless Adapter" - a fairly common component.

A quick dmesg showed:

[37597.927670] usb 2-1.2: New USB device found, idVendor=148f, idProduct=3072
[37597.927679] usb 2-1.2: Product: 802.11 n WLAN
[37597.927681] usb 2-1.2: Manufacturer: Ralink
[37597.927683] usb 2-1.2: SerialNumber: 1.0
[37598.046881] usb 2-1.2: reset high-speed USB device number 4 using ehci-pci
[37598.164195] ieee80211 phy1: rt2x00_set_rt: Info - RT chipset 3071, rev 021c detected
[37598.218612] ieee80211 phy1: rt2x00_set_rf: Info - RF chipset 0008 detected
[37598.224263] ieee80211 phy1: Selected rate control algorithm 'minstrel_ht'
[37598.240133] ieee80211 phy1: rt2x00lib_request_firmware: Info - Loading firmware file 'rt2870.bin'
[37598.240397] ieee80211 phy1: rt2x00lib_request_firmware: Info - Firmware detected - version: 0.29

So, there you have it - simple enough to investigate, but not really repairable.

If you've enjoyed this post, you can buy me something from my Amazon Wishlist.

Unboxing

Linux Set Up

To set the camera up, you need to use its internal webserver. So, how can you find out the IP address of the camera?

1. Use the provided network cable to connect the camera to your router.
2. If you have WINE installed, you can run the auto-run program on the provided CD. It should find the camera's IP address.
   
3. If not, log on to your router and see what IP address has been given to the camera.
4. Go to that IP address in your web browser - and you should see this
   
5. Click on the settings page
6. Do you want random strangers able to view and control your camera? No? Change the password straight away!

You can then either use the wizard or go through each setting yourself.

There are lots of options - you can have alerts emailed or uploaded to FTP, you can set the bitrate and image size for different video streams, you can access the camera via your smartphone (there is an app for iOS, Android, and BlackBerry - or plain old RTSP will work). If you're a geek, you'll thrill at being able to select exactly the right codec at the perfect bitrate for your needs.

Improvements

This new Y-Cam has one major improvement over the previous versions - motion detection can now be set up in Linux. The previous model insisted that you use an ActiveX control in Internet explorer. This model was quite happy with me using Firefox in Ubuntu. In this example I have set a motion detection window on the door handle.

Pros

For a shade under £200, this is a great bit of kit.

• Infrared mode - spot baddies in the dark.
• Wall mounting bracket (or just leave it on a bookshelf)
• It will email you when it detects movement.
• The power cable is 3 metres long, so you can position the camera just about anywhere.
• Good support forum.
• Regular firmware updates.
• You can now record direct to NAS or microSD card.

Cons

This is a remarkably capable camera - with only a few minor negative points.

• No light on the plug. The previous incarnation of the camera had a light on the plug so you could tell when it was powered on.
• Low resolution. The 640*480 resolution is good enough - but who doesn't like more megapixels?
• You can now record direct to NAS - however, it's a choice between NAS or microSD. I would have liked to have seen an option to record to both.
  
• The WiFi can be a bit picky. It will quite happily find networks and identify was encryption they have, but sometimes it just fails to associate with them.
  
  Annoyingly, it doesn't say why a connection has failed. It could be the wrong password, or something else. I eventually got it on the WiFi - but I couldn't tell you what I was doing wrong the first time.
• The setup instructions are quite poorly worded. They're not too tricky, but could do with a bit more care.
• Not open source. My previous Y-Cam is not receiving updates any more, that's fine as a business decision, but I wish I had the security of knowing that I could update the camera's firmware even after the official support period.
• The default password is 1234 and should be changed immediately. It would be much better if it was factory-set to the serial number of the device.

Conclusion

For an Internet security camera this is an excellent piece of equipment with a reasonable price point. It's even cheaper if you forgo the SD option.

Set up is complex - but I think that's a good thing. If you want to go down the simple route - you can sign up for Y-Cam's HIVE which is a simple portal for managing and viewing your camera.

You can stream the images & audio via RTSP or HTTP using MJPEG, MPEG4, ASF, or just JPG snapshots.

At this price point, you don't get PTZ or optical zoom. But you do get mobile friendly video streaming and Linux compatibility.

You can buy all the different Y-Cam models at Amazon.

Any questions? Drop them in the comments box and I'll do my best to answer them.

I've got a great little IP security camera - the Y-Cam. It's Internet accessible, so it can email me photos of any suspicious behaviour. It will also stream video and audio to a number of devices - including mobiles.

Under Linux, it's very easy to get the video and audio via mplayer.

mplayer http://username:password@example.com/stream.asf

And we get this rather spiffy video playing.

In fact, there are a number of streams available (depending on camera), including RTSP and 3GP. The ASF stream seems the most Linux friendly.

It's also possible to save the video to a file - so if you catch a miscreant in the act of pilfering, you have video and audio evidence.

mplayer http://user:password@example.com/stream.asf
    -dumpstream -dumpfile ycam.asf

You now have a file which can be played back.

What I can't seem to work out is how to do the two together. I want a command which will show me the video and at the same time save it to disk.

So, fearless Internet commentors - any helpful suggestions?

The QR code is near the bottom, and has some explanatory text letting you know how to use it. There's even a shortcode to get a reader. The URL that's sent back from the SMS is http://www.isitetv.com/mobile/reader.html which redirects to the popular i-nigma reader.

A clearer shot of the QR card The QR resolves to http://www.isitetv.com/pen-m1.htm?INGUID=17662.

The Mobile Site

Light and quick to load. Uses a single image with links to mobile formatted videos. The only downside is that the Terms and Conditions links to a non-mobile site.

How To Make It Better

Overall, this is a really well executed QR campaign. There are a few niggles - thankfully minor.

• If possible, consider the height of your QR code in relation to the typical viewer. This one is quite near the ground. Making people stoop is a barrier to entry.
• Keep your URLs short. The current URL "http://www.isitetv.com/pen-m1.htm?INGUID=17662" could be rewritten as "http://isitetv.com/pen?i=17662" for example. A shorter URL is easier to scan.
• Keep URLs on brand. To prevent QR hijacking, a URL like "http://m.olympus.co.uk/PEN/17662" reassures customers that they're going to a legitimate site.
• Finally, if possible, make sure all URLs point to mobile friendly pages.

Well done to Olympus and iSiteTV for a great QR campaign.

You can buy Olympus pen cameras on Amazon

File Sizes

The glasses, it turns out, record in 1.1GB chunks. If you really want to know the details, the videos are

1,231,771,216 bytes
1,233,678,696 bytes

Each file is 30 minutes and 1 second long. Annoyingly, there is a gap between the videos of roughly 10 seconds.

My calculations from earlier were incorrect - an 8GB card is enough to hold just shy of 4 hours of video.

Compressing

I'm hosting the video on archive.org. One of their services is to re-encode the video into a web-friendly format. What's quite stunning (to me) is the inefficiency of the MJPEG codec which the glasses use.

The change in quality is negligible - as you can see from the demo.

I wonder how much more expensive the glasses would be if they recorded in an efficient format like Ogg Video? Obviously, there would be battery life considerations - but being able to record 10 times as much video on a single memory card is a big gain.

Another demo

This is using flash, however, Archive.org also offer HTML5 video which I'll be moving to after #NaBloPoMo has finished.

I wondered if anyone was selling them second-hand on eBay. They weren't. But there were a whole load of clones. "Spy Sunglasses DVR" and the like. Some were technically very impressive - bluetooth, mp3 players, fm radios - all built in.

I went for the cheapest pair I could find. 1280x960 video resolution (actually 640x480 - more on that later), no built in memory, and shipped from Hong Kong.

Total cost? £16.50. A damned site cheaper than the Immortal glasses - but would they be any good? After two weeks on a slow boat from the East, they finally arrived...

So, how well do they work?

Test Videos

Sunshine Test

Walking down Brick Lane in the dark

The video glasses I purchased said that they recorded at 1280x960 - in fact, they're only half that at 640x480. The seller has agreed a partial refund. I'm not convinced that the 1280 version would be any more than interpolated upwards.

Test Pictures

The resolution of the pics is 3264*2448. Click the pictures for full size.

The Specs (geddit?)

• Weight: 52g
• Battery:5V DC 450mAh
• Recharging Time: 3-6 hours
• Continuous working Time: 2-3 hours
• Picture Resolution: The rather odd 3264*2448.
• Video details (based on usage, not manufacturer's details)
• Video 640*480
• Audio is driven by a mono microphone on the left side.
• Mplayer says: VIDEO: [MJPG] 640x480 24bpp 29.710 fps 5479.8 kbps (668.9 kbyte/s)
• Mplayer says: AUDIO: 24000 Hz, 1 ch, u8, 192.0 kbit/100.00%

Once plugged in to USB, the camera just shows up as a USB mass storage drive. No software needed. Works perfectly on Linux.

lsusb produced

05e1:0b02 Syntek Semiconductor Co., Ltd

The Down Side

Look, it's a piece of sweatshop produced plastic. Don't expect the world, ok? That said, there are a few minor niggles.

• Mini USB rather than Micro USB. All of my gadgets use the new standard - I have plenty of mini cables, but it's a pain that this doesn't support the new standard.
• Limited to 8GB MicroSD card. To be fair, that's ~2 hours of recording time - which is what the battery is rated at.
• The lenses of the sunglasses seem to be smoked glass and don't offer any real UV protection.
• The lenses are meant to be removable (I've got a clear pair of lenses coming) but I can't find any way to remove them.
• Glasses are lightweight but feel quite fragile.
• Glasses are a little tight for my big head.
• The mono microphone picks up what the wearer is saying reasonably well - but other sounds can be quite muffled. I think this is because the mic is pointing downwards.

All that said, I'm reasonably impressed with them.

Setting The Time

One of the problems with buying cheap tat from China is that the instructions are... obtuse.  As you can see in the above videos and pictures, I managed to screw up the time initially.

To set the time correctly, create a file called "time.txt" in the root directory. Open it up in your favourite text editor and type the time using this format.

2010.11.05 13.45.30 Y

That's "YYYY.MM.DD HH.MM.SS" The "Y" at the end tells the camera to place a timestamp on every video and picture. If you don't want a timestamp, write it as

2010.11.05 13.45.30 N

Once the file is saved and the camera turned on, the time will be set and the file automatically deleted.

Comparisons

Comparing the video to the hyper-expensive Looxcie

And the Immortal

I think this generic set holds up very well.

Conclusion

Under twenty quid? Bargain! It certainly falls in to the "good enough" category.

What's the next logical step? Viewing on your mobile, of course!

Two British companies have come up with some innovative - and cheap - technologies to make watching over your home as simple as picking up your phone.

Y-Cam

Y-Cam ready to be unboxed

Y-Cam is an Internet camera which looks like any other.

It works via ethernet or WiFi. A full compliment of acronyms and tech spec including, DDNS, NTP, user management, ftp, email. It's got a decent VGA resolution. It has Infra-red for the all important night vision. In short, it's got everything you'd expect from a standard IP camera.

Night Vision

But the Y-Cam has three little secrets.

The first is that you don't need to be chained to your PC to watch what's going on at home. The Y-Cam has an inbuilt RTSP server - so you can stream live video and audio directly to your handset! If you've only got a 2.5G phone - that's no problem, you can set the bandwidth to a level that's suitable for your device. Y-Cam have recently updated the device's firmware to include BlackBerry support.

If you want a demo of the quality, visit Y-Cam's live gallery.

The second secret is that it will email you photos when it detects motion. Because you can choose the size of the emailed photo, it's perfect for receiving on your phone. Here's a snap sent to my BlackBerry.

An email alert on a BlackBerry. Thumbnail image fills the screen when clicked

But, saving the best for last, Y-Cam works flawlessly with Linux. And Mac, if you're in to that sort of thing. Everything from set-up, configuration and viewing works as well in FireFox as it does in IE. The only thing it won't do is set up specific motion detection zones - that uses Active-X so can only be done with Internet Explorer. A minor blemish.

Motion detected!

The Y-Cam costs around £150. Bargain!

Peepr

The second is small British start-up Peepr.

Peepr take a decidedly low-tech approach. All you need is a PC and a Webcam. You visit peepr.tv and their Flash application hooks into your webcam & microphone. You're now broadcasting on the web at and the mobile at peepr.mobi/

Peepr preparing to broadcast

Done. And it won't cost you a penny.  Peepr will even attempt to SMS you if it detects motion.

Of course, it's a lot less fully featured than the Y-Cam, but its power is in its simplicity.  If you've got a PC or laptop and a £9.99 webcam, you can have an instant view of your home whether you're sat in the office, pub or train.

So, two pretty smart and simple ways to watch over your stuff from your phone.

Enjoy!