Gilly,I am not suggesting you owe the club anything. The purchase was
approved, but given we already had a camera car, I'm not sure why we needed a
second one. As I said before, that is water over the dam. We should send a
formal complaint to Lionel to let them know how lousy the quality of the image
you get through the window is, and if the software is infected, they should
know it and fix it..John
-----Original Message-----
From: Thomas Gilsdorf <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: rc3r@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <rc3r@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thu, Jun 18, 2020 7:53 am
Subject: [rc3r] Re: Lionel Caboose with Camera
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
