Home made ice camera

[silverdoctor]

Was kicking around the idea of buying an underwater ice cam for this year.

Went looking through the old laptops I have, and wouldn't you know it, I have an Asus EEE PC, pretty small for a laptop. The trick is that it runs on 12 volts DC direct. Long life battery but I have 2 small VA UPS batteries as well...

Should work to mount a webcam in a waterproof box, long USB (may need a USB hub to go deeper) and use the laptop for recording/viewing...

[AppleJax]

Newfie ice cam! Love it!

[Geezle]

Sounds like a lot of work!


But hey, if you have all the stuff to do it, it could be an entertaining project :cool:

[silverdoctor]

Not so worried about the waterproofing, just wondering about how the cold is going to affect the camera... Have the dash cam in the car that's waterproof and good for the cold but not sure if it'll send a feed to a computer through usb. Shall find out in the next couple of weeks.

[CanadianBadass]

I think your biggest issue is gonna be the Cold

#1 , Will your PC run in that cold of condition?
#2 , Will your waterproofing hold up to the cold?
#3 , Will the webcam Kill your battery quickly?
#4 , Will the webcam hold up in the cold? Maybe the cold will be to much for the cords?

Its a great Idea but.. lol

Im not to sure but, I bet you could find a steal of a deal on a Under water cam on kijiji or something for around 200$ , or just go buy the cheap FishTv for I think its 179$ New,


I woudnt be willing to try to do all this and risk running my Laptop in the cold and ruining it ....

If you pull this off , Your the man,
If you don't, well, hope only something cheap breaks lol lol :sad0071:

[Randyandkim]

Last year I bought a camera on eBay and rigged it up with a battery and 7 inch alpine LCD all in a pelican case, it looked awsome but was a peice of junk the picture was about 10 times worse than my aqua vu, not sure where the problem was but I'm thinkin the camera... My store bought one has infra red so maybe that's where the EBay camera was lacking.

[silverdoctor]

No faith in newfie engineering? No need to spend alot of money on a past time when I have most of what I need here.

If you seen the laptop, you'd laugh. Tiny, 8.9" wide, maybe a 8" screen.

http://netbookreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/asus-900ha.jpg


The onboard battery should give a couple of hours in a warm tent, it claims 5 hours on the onboard, but it'll never give up that much. 2 additional 12V UPS batteries should give a few extra hours for sure. Not too worried. Dim the screen and it should give more. Like I say, I have the waterproof cam that can handle the cold but i'll be testing it this weekend to ensure I can get live video through usb.

[AppleJax]

I'd love to hear how it works out. The best engineers are Newfies and Farmers ;)

[happyfisher]

I did it...took a camera....made a waterproof houseing out of ABS piping....usb to my computer....worked great till i put it down the hole.....kept shutting down...i was kinda mad

[silverdoctor]

I did it...took a camera....made a waterproof houseing out of ABS piping....usb to my computer....worked great till i put it down the hole.....kept shutting down...i was kinda mad

What was shutting down? Laptop or camera?

I've got the laptop running with a USB logitech orbital, which has a good draw to it.

1/2 hour now and only 10% drop on the battery, recording the whole time. Have the USB cable coiled up and sitting in a glass of salted ice water (really cold, hurts to hold a finger in it) as well just to see if there's any issues with a cold usb cable.

[Lund rebel]

For some reason I looked at this and saw home made ice cream, was I ever disappointed when I opened up this lol. I think the only draw back is going to be waterproofing the computer or just the cold not working so well with the computer. Being a field mechanic I know what -40 does to a computer, you have hours of battery life inside but about 10 minutes in the cold, it doesn't take much water or snow or dropping to break the computer in the cold. Even opening and closing the computer can wreck it. Fairly small wires in the pivot point and they are brittle. But if you have it all siting around it would be interesting you might be able to make the first hd camera

[silverdoctor]

For some reason I looked at this and saw home made ice cream, was I ever disappointed when I opened up this lol. I think the only draw back is going to be waterproofing the computer or just the cold not working so well with the computer. Being a field mechanic I know what -40 does to a computer, you have hours of battery life inside but about 10 minutes in the cold, it doesn't take much water or snow or dropping to break the computer in the cold. Even opening and closing the computer can wreck it. Fairly small wires in the pivot point and they are brittle. But if you have it all siting around it would be interesting you might be able to make the first hd camera

Thought about ice cream when I read the title as well. This is just out of curiousity more than anything, if it works, wonderbar.

I realize there's going to be loss of battery life, it's sitting on the kitchen counter right now with the usb cable in ice water just for a trial run. I'll charge it back up and toss it outside tonite for a bit, supposed to be -12 according to weather canada... The tent is going to be warm, and spare batteries on hand.

It's a 9" laptop, lithium ion battery pack.

[silverdoctor]

It's outside now, iphone says -7. Been an hour and down to 79% and cable is still sitting in ice water.

[silverdoctor]

Could work... -7 outdoors, little bit of wind, laptop sitting on a frozen chair, still managed just over an hour on 79% battery. 6 feet of USB cable was still coiled up in ice water, actually iced over, recording the whole time with a fairly high wattage web cam. The cam I use will be small.

Couple of 12V batteries and a warm tent should do just fine for a day on the ice.

Happy, I don't understand why yours would have shut down unless water was getting in somewhere. Maybe a crack in the usb shield?

[mayuan]

Sounds like a fun idea, but it wont work. Well, if you want to go past about 15' due to the usb power and you will need a light on the camera. Another issue will be condensation inside of the camera housing. The laptop should be fine to about -10C and the LCD will stop functioning that well. the biggest issue will be the frozen cables cracking. Not worth the grief, but it was fun to build and test.

How do I know.... Built one and had the issues. Used the HP net book for the laptop and a Microsoft webcam. battery backup was just a battery booster.

I did attempt to make another underwater camera with all the proper equipment. priced it all out is the price was very decent for everything except the umbilical cable. The umbilical was running about $0.75 per foot and you had to buy a minimum of 5000'. I just wanted the camera to go 150'.