Has anybody here had a go at making their own rig for videoing otherwise inaccesible places?
I actually tried this a number of years ago but it was very primitive, literally a lowering a camera on a trip down the adit 4shaft at Rhosydd which resulted in some very poor photography.
I did consider and underwater ROV after seeing a good one on youtube but after some research I decided it was too difficult (for a first project at least)
Next up I considered an RC car to film mines that had been gated, which was ruled out after I found out my dad gave them away when we moved house and converting one to run off a wire is too difficult for me at the moment.
This leaves me with the simplest idea which is lowering a camera down shafts. The plan is to make a rig able to go down 50m (reduced from 100m because usb extender for that range are expensive), be able to live stream to my laptop and be small enough to fit through some grates.
The camera has a webcam mode which streams via USB to a computer, this can be extended with a USB extender and ethernet cable to around 50m. The other option is to use the built in wifi and an extension cable running from my laptop although I'm unsure if it will make 50m in a shaft setting.
Lighting wise I was thinking of putting 2 or 3 Led lights on and running it off a portable power pack.
The easiest option is to just use the SD card. Problem now being that you can't see what it's doing after going down so far.
I'm also trying to keep costs down as much as possible.
Has anybody who knows what they are doing got any ideas which is best? I'm leaning towards cable to reliability but
I'm going to do some range testing on the wifi aspect.