Rather than continuing to hijack other posts I thought I had better create my own.
Last night I hooked up the 7" tft monitor I bought off ebay and arrived yesterday (car reversing camera set up), and all is working well. Picture is pretty good and it only needs a 12v supply which is an easy battery in the travel case.
I also managed to find drivers of an old USB easycap video device and got the picture up on my windows 10 PC as well.
I am still unsure about the housing penetration, so I am going to test a couple of varieties.
No 1, is using a cable gland, I will take the individual cores of the CAT 5, and mould them in marine epoxy in a cylindrical container to provide some solid for the gland to squeeze.
No 2, is using the open rov style flat channel between two plates full of expoxy.
No 3, buy a couple of the nice penetrators seen on here.
I am also looking at slip rings to transfer the signal of the cable reel that I can run out to any depth whilst still attached and watching the picture.
Nice - looking forward to following along. I’m impressed that the camera works well through the cables without baluns! Have you connected the camera directly to the screen and through the tether and compared the image quality. Any noticeable difference?
Rusty, remember I did this comparison through 200 feet of cat5e on my neighborhood street (potentially lots of electrical interference) and saw no difference in image quality with and without the baluns. Apparently, unless you get into HD quality, the impedance matching issue isn’t an issue.
Hi, been distracted but now the diving season is approaching time to get this running right.
I forgot some ballast so had to improvise with a rock, worked ok.
I used a local harbour so managed to get it to about 4m.
All worked well with no leaks. Need to work on how to keeping it pointing in the right direction and upright.
Video feed is fine but I am going to shorten the tether to make it more manageable. It would be better if I could get a higher resolution larger screen. It was much better in the shade so I am going to work on some side screens for the monitor. The double sided tape mounting also failed so I am going to beef that up a bit so the screen stays in the lids of the pelicase.
Also need to considering lighting next using a spare dive torch.
Looking at the footage on my pc at home it is so much better than on the small monitor, so will review what resolution I am getting from the camera and make sure the monitor matches.
Looking at the footage on my pc at home it is so much better than on the small monitor, so will review what resolution I am getting from the camera and make sure the monitor matches.
That’s because the live feed from the USB is SD quality, around 500 TVL, whereas the recorded footage is whatever you’ve set it to (could be 1080, 4k etc.) We’ve found the best monitor is an 11.6" screen, sunshade, warm colour option (if you’ve got that), dynamic contrast on. You’ll also find that the resolution of the live feed when recording is much better than when in standby (so make sure your camera is always recording, even if you just have the camera in loop mode).
Hi Adrian,
I have a BlueROV2 and I like add 3 cam goPro, but I need video live from they.
The situation is very similar to that you have, just that I will like use the 3 twisted pairs of tether wire that are free.
Can you post the diagram of connections (thinking in minimal connections -battery charged of goPro and so on-)?
I have this for now:
I know that the white cable sends video, Do I just need connect this? or Do I need connect 5V and GND also?
In top side, How I must connect the output wires? and What kind of monitor I can use?
Hi. I just use found the two wires that carry the video feed, a bit of trial and error. Run that through a pair of the Cat5 wires, connect to a yellow video composite connector on the other end, that plugs into the reversing camera screen.
This year diving campaign is just around the corner so hopefully I will get the camera in its own housing sorted into the drop camera that will be in a much better configuration for towing behind the dive boat.
