User talk:Phil

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Revision as of 11:37, 9 May 2009 by Andrey.filippov (talk | contribs) (May 2009)
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Phils elphel blog of mishaps!

April 2009

'353 lan cable issues'

just before we left to film in Spain the hard drive stopped working on the 353. Seemed like the hard drive had failed. So I replaced the hard drive at the hotel but still could not see the drive. We ended up filming with the 333 again. When I came back from Spain I set the camera up with the older cables & the thing worked again. Seemed to be working better also. After replacing the old cables with the new Cat5 lan cabbles the hard drive was not visible again... Will upload some pics of the cables, the new cable would not work with the 333 if that adds a clue.


Some 333 Images 2000px 24fps - Majorca 2009 http://ergovideo.com/Tacx2009/Majorca2009/Formentor-Colobra/Image11.jpg http://ergovideo.com/Tacx2009/Majorca2009/SanSalvador/Image11.jpg http://ergovideo.com/Tacx2009/Majorca2009/Orient-with-Odwin/Image16.jpg


May 2009

Having issues with the 353 recording in high vibration situations. Seemed to work flawlessly recording from a helmet for the 40minutes it took a pro MTB rider to ride a lap of the super rough Houffalize world cup. But recording from a car over cobbles or from a Motorbike (tarmac roads) seems not possible. The camera stream will stay on with the car set up but will tend to reset on the motorbike. recording smaller files does not help as does jpegs. My thinking is that there is enough space in a cache someplace to deal with the shock & jolts from the MTB race but not enough to deal with the constant lower force vibration of the motorbike or cobbles. I noticed that on cobbles we could always record about the 1st 200meters so maybe the cache is the issue?


Phil. it would be very interesting to find an actual nature of these problems - as you now there is a huge number of cameras mounted on vehicles that do not exhibit them.

First of all - what exactly is reset - does camera reboot, streamer is interrupted or camogm (if you are recording to disk) ? You can check if camera is reboot with

http://camera_ip/phpshell.php?command=uptime

--Andrey.filippov 23:50, 7 May 2009 (CDT)

I tried again yesterday with the car set up & recorded fine video for some hours on the road. We then did some of the cobbled climbs from the Tour of Flanders & started to see the 1st halts to the recording onto the built in HDD. Ive recorded over cobbles fine with a Toyota 4x4 so its a case of just a little too much vibration on my little renault! The camera never reset this time so that may have been the LiPo battery starting to get low. I do not think its a camera issue so much but rather a issue of the hard drive being fixed to the camera.....So the obvious solution as I write this must be a way add some form of vibration dampening between the camera & drive or go for a memory based drive. On a helmet I guess even though the drive is subject to a lot of jolts your head would remove the high frequency stuff that is probably not all that HDD friendly.

Phil, it would beneficial for the camera (video, actually) if the camera is dampened too, not just the HDD. Maybe something like this ? --Andrey.filippov 08:56, 8 May 2009 (CDT)

--Phil 10:28, 9 May 2009 (CDT) Im going for the sata external drive idea for the road based films. But to do this means I have to pull appart the camera & reconnect the zif cable of the internal HDD for times I need the helmetcam footage. Will try the damping idea later on. Tip - 500GB sata drives can be seen from the camera via consol but not so well via camogmgui. Reformatting & making a 185GB partition seemed to solve the issue at least for the time being. A Easy way to make a Sata external is to break open a old USB external cadi then use a sata cable with a IDE power connector at one end. Removing the old IDE cable & making a bigger hole for the sata & in my case the extra long IDE power cable resulted in a fairly clean looking elphel external drive. Now to test it out on some cobbles!


Phil, there is a way (not so convenient yet) to have both IDE HDD and SATA connected as described here: 10369#Example_-_setting_SATA_to_be_IDE_slave_.28needed_if_bottom_CF_card_or_internal_HDD_is_installed.29: After that you need to reboot (without disconnecting power) the camera and SATA will slave (/dev/hdb)--Andrey.filippov 13:34, 9 May 2009 (CDT)