There is no need for that.
The club agreed to make the purchase. The quality is not your fault.
As you said, it is still a caboose. And the camera does work. It is there
for anyone that wants to play with it.
Rick
On Thu, Jun 18, 2020 at 7:53 AM Thomas Gilsdorf <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
The club paid $98 for the caboose. I am accountable for that purchase. A
prorated about will be returned to the club. FWIW, it is still a caboose,
and the colors do match the Atlas switcher that the club already owns.
John, please suggest what you would consider to be a fair amount.
Gilly
-----Original Message-----
From: John Crockett <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: rc3r@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <rc3r@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wed, Jun 17, 2020 1:22 pm
Subject: [rc3r] Re: Lionel Caboose with Camera
The buy sounds like a mistake to me. Water over the dam, but I would
guess someone would have posted what a pain the thing is to operate/use.
John
-----Original Message-----
From: Ken Young <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: rc3r@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Wed, Jun 17, 2020 11:32 am
Subject: [rc3r] Lionel Caboose with Camera
The club purchased a Lionel CSX caboose equipped with a WiFi camera. If
you remember the club also has a Norfolk Southern modern observation car
with a camera. Tom asked me to take a look at the caboose and get it
working.
One of the problems with these camera cars is the camera is inside the car
and looks through one of the cast clear windows. Being cheap plastic these
windows tend to fog and distort the picture. The solution other people have
done was to just remove the window so I tried to do that. However I wound
up knocking the camera off its mount in the process and had to take the
whole caboose apart to fix it. After struggling for a few hours to take it
apart and reassemble it, everything works.
Some observations:
- The app is terrible. There are a number of steps you have to follow
which aren't well explained or not explained in the instructions. There are
functions on the app that have been disabled but the icons for them are
still there. It was a lot of trial and error to figure out how to do
things. We probably need a "how to" set of instructions or a class before
running it on the club layouts.
- It has to have a constant 18 volts on the track to work so it won't
work for conventional operation. The track has to be clean. Any short power
interruption will interrupt the picture and may cause the WiFi to crash. If
that happens you have to reset the camera and start over.
- There are several picture resolutions that can be chosen. The low
and medium resolutions are poor. The high resolution is OK, HD is great but
the frame rate is a lot slower on HD and winds up freezing the picture a
lot.
I shot several videos of my home layout to see what worked and didn't
work. I tried emailing one of the videos but the file size is too large and
failed to go through so I posted it on YouTube. Click on this link: ??
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySovVe0URa4&feature=youtu.be???? I used
the high resolution setting and it looked fine on my phone. However, when I
emailed it to myself the aspect ratio of the picture changed so that the
picture is distorted vertically (drawn out). I don't have a video editor on
my computer to try to fix that.
Ken
