Well the last couple of months have been a rocky ride for the pondcam. In April we attempted to upgrade to a better camera using the Logitech Fusion for the webcam and a newly designed box for the container. One thing I noticed was that the minimum focussing distance of these web cams is too far away while the proclivities of pondlife mean that they tend to be, well, on the camera. To get round this I designed a polycarbonate box which could be easily clamped onto one of the glass tanks I had made to make the Tadpole Timelapse films. The idea was that the tank would provide a clear 'spacer' which would ensure a good image and indeed when it was first installed it worked excellently I have to say. It did have one design flaw however - after a week the watertight camera box was full of water! I removed the camera, took it apart and put it in the airing cupboard for a few days and hey presto the camera worked again! Clearly my testing of the box needed to be more rigourous. I think that maybe the polycarbonate sheet i used for the body of the tank did not give a perfect seal when used with the Aquarium sealant, although both the petshop chap who sold the sealant to me and the back of the box said it could. While I redeveloped the box I simply took the camera and jammed it in the tube carrying the usb cable to the pond. Not watertight but weatherproof enough to provide pictures of the pond surface. In otherwords pictures of duckweed. I also purchased a slightly upgraded version of the Logitech webcam and discovered that it had a manual focus mode and also a face tracking function which could prove useful.
Unfortunately while this was happening the Pondcam PC died!
So armed with a newish PC (which looked suspiciously like the old one...) and a renovated box with a new camera, we started again 2 weeks ago. The pictures were excellent and the surface layer of duckweed far from impeding the light so much that it interfered with the camera gave the light a beautiful green cast while also preventing the blowout of highlights that had bedevilled earlier attempts. It was well worth clearing the duckweed away however, since the clearered area immediately became home to a swarm of tadpoles.
However, the pc did not last very well and within a week it was back in the workshop again. I managed to get it running and then discovered this weekend that the second attempt at using the polycarbonate box had resulted in the same problem - a box full of pond water! I did have a backup option however: the earlier Logitech cam still worked, and I had devised another Bagcam which did the job and worked on the laptop. So with the polycabonate Boxcam consigned to the bin and the new Logitech webcam in the airing cupboard I tried again. And it still did not work! There may be some sort of software incompatibility but i am frankly a bit stumped.
Aaaargh!
Now i am waiting for the new cam to dry out to see if it still works, and if it does i will try Bagcam 2 again. If not...well we'll cross that bridge then.
It is a shame that there are no images to accompany these ramblings so once I get this up and running I will also take a weekly snapshot at a fixed time to provide some sort of baseline information.
