One other thing - it comes with a CD with the software that allows you
to view the camera directly on your computer. During the loading my
virus monitoring program found a virus and said it eliminated it. I
canceled the download. Just more Lionel quality control issues, allowing
whoever burned the CD's stick a virus on it.
Ken
On 6/17/2020 1:22 PM, John Crockett (Redacted sender jctrainman for
DMARC) wrote:
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
