Pondcam Blog

Nice to hear we aren't alone

Hi Barry,

thanks for the comments, in case anyone hasn't read his comments have a look and follow the link to his site. It is also reassuring to learn that other people are having the same problems with leaks, condensation etc. The set up we have at the moment is working well but the lack of light beneath the green duckweed infested surface is the main problem. So we are currently using it above water, looking for snakes! Keep you posted...

Chris & Steen

Meadowcam 2

This is the second film, made using the third model of the cable car, this time a simple model made from meccano.

I think this is the most successful so far, although it has been severely compressed and subsequently looks a bit rubbish:

Meadowcam 1

As promised we had an attempt at making a film to record a snapshot of the whole meadow using a variety of cable car type devices to transport a small camera on video mode over the top of the meadow. The first, shown here, used gravity to power the cable car, and the lack of control made it less than satisfactory. In fact at the end of the film it smashed into the  post at the end. The second was a very complex affair using some sort of robotic lego gizmo. Looked great, but it did not work at all, so no film. The final version, and the one I think worked best, is shown on the next post.

Here is the first version:

Glasscam up and running...sort of...

 Yesterday I finished off the glass box holding the current incarnation of the pondcam, gluing a connector for a gorillapod, which was mounted onto an aluminium U channel, which in turn was bolted onto the head of a mini tripod.

The resulting rig works excellently and the box certainly survived being submerged for a few hours. Initially there were problems with the box fogging up, inspite of incorporating silicon gel pouches - perhaps they were already saturated and i have made the problem worse!

The cam is currently working well, above water:

However, underwater views were not very successful. I will retry later.

Update Early August 2008

The past couple of weeks have seen some rather odd views due to the failure of the bag cam. We were forced to simply cover the camera with one of the glass photographic tanks I made earlier in the year and place the cam above water level on the bank. The results were obviously more visible than the underwater cam but also captured the most exciting thing so far, a grass snake swimming in the pond.

This raised a new issue. Had the cam been underwater it would have missed this important bit of action, but the raison d'etre of this project was to build an underwater cam. The next idea was to have two cams running, with both an above and a below water option but it is proving more challenging than we expected to actually upload the data.

I have gone ahead and gone for the next attempt at an underwater cam while we resolve this problem. My initial thought was to use the tank we are currently using as a shelter to make a sort of airlock and I constructed a frame to hold it in position upside down. However, the size of the tank (150mm x 150mm x 150mm) meant much more air was trapped than was required causing it to flip unpredictably and risk damaging the camera.

So I went back to my initial polycarbonate box design and re-draughted it for use with 4mm thick float glass. This material had been combined with the same aquarium sealant to construct the tanks to successfully house a Newt larva for three month with no signs of leakage and I felt reasonably confident that it would work. I have got a local glass merchant to cut the pieces and drill a hole in one corner. The total bill was £12.00 plus VAT, so with the sealant the box could easily be made for under £20.00.

It is currently drying underneath the protective covering of one of the larger tanks.It is now sitting on some decking rather than near the pond, hence the rather odd views today. Yesterday I provided a view of the pond, while the lid I had glued on was drying, but I wish I hadn't: the box was inadvertently placed on an angle and the lid slipped slightly before setting. I put a load of extra sealant around the top to make sure and I am certain it will be fine but I will kick myself otherwise.

I am aiming to stick some sort of rail on tomorrow and hopefully have it in the pond by the weekend. Fingers crossed...

Snakewatching

On Monday I received a call from a friend saying his cat had caught a grass snake and he did not know what to do with it. His cat kept on catching these snakes and could I help to release it somewhere safer. I brought it back to the garden and released it. It was about 18" long and about 1/2" in diameter. By the time we got back it was dark and I thought it would be best to release it straight away so I did not get a chance to examine it closely. Frankly, as it slipped off into the undergrowth I thought it would never be seen again.

Well today my wife sent me a text saying SNAKE! I knew exactly that she meant look at the pondcam immediately, so I did and there it was! I have put a print from the screen in the photo album, it's a bit pixellated but it is clear to me that it is the same grass snake.

Newt larva sighting and higher resolution images

I managed to spot a newt larva on Friday morning when I checked the page. I acted quickly and pressed ALT + Print Screen but then acted stupidly and copied something else before I had a chance to paste the picture, so no evidence, but I will try to root around in the recorded files on the pondcam pc to see if it is still there.

It would have been much easier to spot a newt larva had I seen it today because over the weekend Steen upped the image size to 640 x 480 pixels making it much clearer. Most of the activity seems to be pond snail related with a few tadpoles here and there but there are lots of other organisms in there including newt larvae, dragonfly and damselfly nymphs and water shrimps to name but a few. So it is well worth wasting a few minutes on...

Bagcam 2 Refinements

After some further discussions and experimentation the Bagcam version 2 was yanked out of the pond to see if the problem was caused by being in the bagcam (which it turns out it wasn't). It seems that the autofocus was required (at least it did when it was tested on dry land). So the manual was turned off, the bag was cleaned and then the whole thing was reassembled and then put back in a variety of locations. I settled on a fairly weedy but still light patch. The murk of the pond means that anything further than 10 cm away or so is impenetrably dark, while the weed cuts down on the light levels i the foreground so that it is not too dazzling for the camera to handle. There is the odd lump of vegetation in the way every now and then, but overall i would say that it is now working.

Pondcam is go! Again! For the time being...

Well it is showing images again, although they aren't great. I went back to the bagcam idea and adapted another camer waterproofing bag I bought to achieve the same purpose. It certainly works but the image i very poorly defined and the clarity is appalling. Needs a yet more work I think...

Belated update - June 08

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.