FlycamOne2 Review

Can it be used as a rear-facing camera for cycle commuting?

By Dave Brennan

I’ve been a cycling borg for a while. My camera sits connected to me on the right side of my head, just under my helmet. However, after having a chat with my bike (borg can do that) I realised that my bike felt a little left out. It wanted to be borg to. So the search began for a gadget that would borgify the bike.

Then I found the FlycamOne2 with the help of an online forum user at CycleChat (PrettyboyTim). It was touted as a cheap (£39.99), light (37g!!!), and hopefully functional camera, that I could fit on the back of the bike to give me a view of my rear (ahem!). This camera, if it did what it said on the tin, would allow me to show on video what goes on behind the bike, as well as what my head camera already picks up. So with a bit of financial jiggery pokery, I found a spare £39.99 (and another £8 for a SD card).

It arrived a couple of days later in a lovely little black box which contained all of the bits. The camera, a USB cable, a wrist strap (?), an electrical contact platform for the back, some Velcro pads and a user manual. Unusually for me, I decided to look at the user manual first!

Hmmm. Acme (the company that made this little bag of tricks) need to employ another translator. It’s not the best user manual in the world (see links below). However, I managed to glean the basics from it and I decided to switch it on. However, to my dismay it would seem that I couldn’t do much with it until my memory card arrived, as it cannot record onto its admittedly paltry internal memory. Pooh! I could set it up as a web cam (which worked fine) but nothing else. So I waited until the card arrived making sure that it was fully charged (via USB) and updated with the latest firmware.

Warning: Please ignore the manual with regards to updating the firmware (and the readmes that come with it). They are gibberish and don’t work. This chap knows what he is talking about (http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/member.php?u=5040)

5 days later, the card arrived, so I set to work testing this little beastie. Of course I did the obligatory point the camera at your face and film your nostrils tests (not linked here!) which worked well enough, although as it was in a light room at night it was obvious that night filming would be a problem. However, the real test would only come when I took it out on my commute. So the next day, armed with plenty of sellotape it was fixed to the back of my bike. Off I went.

When I get to work and have a look at the camera I found that it was no longer filming. This did not come as a complete surprise as I had heard that the lithium polymer battery it used had limited power (and takes a few cycles to reach full power). However, I had hoped that it had succeeded in filming at least some of the commute. It had! Yippee!

Not only had it worked, but it had caught an incident. The rear footage looked a treat. It was easily able to pick up the registration number of a van as it sped passed under bright light conditions. It also picked up the sound pretty well despite being at the back of the bike! A second test was required, however that would have to wait as I now had a week on holiday. No commutes for a while!

A week and a bit later and with more sellotape on hand I used it again under cloudy but fairly bright conditions. Once again it coped well, but you can see that the transition into the darker tunnel highlights its limitations in poor lighting which will be a problem in the dark winter commutes.

Video into tunnel

Video under bright and overcast conditions

The camera produces video at 640x480 resolution at 25 fps and in a different mode can produce photos at 1280x1024. It takes SD cards up to and including 2Gb. They have to be able to write at a reasonable speed. My sandisk ultra II 2Gb card seems to work fine. (£8 from play.com). With a 2Gb card it would probably hold about 40 minutes worth of footage. The USB connection to the computer is a little slow (USB 1.1.), so a card reader for the SD card is recommended.

It has some modes that I haven’t looked into yet, including a loop mode, where you can continuously record and if it gets to the end of the card it will start at the beginning again which might be useful (if the battery can last long enough!). It also has a mode for videoing in the dark, which I will need to test, but I have heard it isn’t great.

The camera is controlled using an on off switch and two buttons, one for the shutter and one to change the mode (this picture also shows the connector which is described later). They are functional, but a bit fiddly and not very clearly marked. The USB connector and the card slot are on the other side of the camera.

The white blob next to the lens is an infra-red detector which, when the camera is set to the appropriate mode, allows it to be used as a spy cam. The detector starts and stops recording depending on motion detected by the IR detector. I haven’t tried this, as it is not a useful function on the bike. I am always in motion, honest!

The camera lens can be rotated by 90 degrees, which is nice, increasing mounting options. I am sure if you wanted to you could mount this somewhere on a helmet, if you wanted to use it as a helmet camera.

There are three big disadvantages I can see with this camera. Firstly it isn’t waterproof. So use of it on wet days is a no-no, unless I can figure out a way to protect it whilst keeping the lens clear (any ideas?). The second is the poor video in low light. It is possible that this might improve with firmware upgrades. The third and probably biggest problem is with the battery.

There is a possible solution to the battery problem. The nice people at ACME have supplied a connector that fits on the back of the camera. The connector has some pins that could be used to power the camera (it need 5 volts at least 350mA). An external battery pack could be added if you knew how, or know a man who can, and some of the pins could be used to connect a toggle switch, so that the videoing could be started and stopped. These features are aimed at the remote control community, but it could be useful for cyclists as well.

Conclusion

If you want a cheap video camera for your bike or helmet, and you are willing to avoid the rain and the dark and cycle for only 20 minutes (or to add a battery pack) then I would recommend this little beastie. For the price it produces video that exceeds the ATC 2000 and is not all that far away from my much dearer Archos helmet camera system.

Links

http://www.flycamone2.com/download/Manual_fco2_303_defritenes.pdf

Dave's youtube account with lots of entertaining videos!

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