I ordered a borescope camera earlier this week for $20 and it arrived today. I am fairly impressed with it.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JERRES6
Here is a 2MP snapshot from it:
It is a tiny camera, less than 1 centimeter in diameter, and plugs into a PC or android device via USB. It has very limited focus depth. 2 to 3 inches away from the lens is in focus. Any closer or farther and it gets blurry, but that is okay for the intended purpose, which is inspecting behind walls and in other tight spaces. It has white LEDs on the front that are controllable via a small dial on the USB connector.
For android, you typically need an "OTG" adapter cable and the device must support USB OTG.
An amazon review pointed me at the CameraFi android app, which is free and allows you to view the camera and save video or snapshots. It adds a watermark with no way to remove it (you can't even buy a pro version or anything) ... so I hacked it. For personal use of course. It was actually very simple thanks to the abundance of modern software. I pulled the apk off my tablet with an app called Apk Extractor and transferred it to my PC with Dropbox. I extracted all the watermark images with 7zip, edited them to be blank with GIMP, and re-packaged them, again with 7zip. The modified apk wouldn't install, and my intuition told me that my modifications had probably made the apk's signature fail to validate. So I had to re-sign the apk with dex2jar first. Then I transferred the modified and signed apk back to my tablet and was able to install it by tapping the modified apk in Dropbox.
It can only do 3 FPS at 1600x1200 resolution, or up to 30 fps at lower resolutions.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JERRES6
Here is a 2MP snapshot from it:
It is a tiny camera, less than 1 centimeter in diameter, and plugs into a PC or android device via USB. It has very limited focus depth. 2 to 3 inches away from the lens is in focus. Any closer or farther and it gets blurry, but that is okay for the intended purpose, which is inspecting behind walls and in other tight spaces. It has white LEDs on the front that are controllable via a small dial on the USB connector.
For android, you typically need an "OTG" adapter cable and the device must support USB OTG.
An amazon review pointed me at the CameraFi android app, which is free and allows you to view the camera and save video or snapshots. It adds a watermark with no way to remove it (you can't even buy a pro version or anything) ... so I hacked it. For personal use of course. It was actually very simple thanks to the abundance of modern software. I pulled the apk off my tablet with an app called Apk Extractor and transferred it to my PC with Dropbox. I extracted all the watermark images with 7zip, edited them to be blank with GIMP, and re-packaged them, again with 7zip. The modified apk wouldn't install, and my intuition told me that my modifications had probably made the apk's signature fail to validate. So I had to re-sign the apk with dex2jar first. Then I transferred the modified and signed apk back to my tablet and was able to install it by tapping the modified apk in Dropbox.
It can only do 3 FPS at 1600x1200 resolution, or up to 30 fps at lower resolutions.
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