Today I had an amazing flight with the 808 #16 key chain camera I bought on Ebay from China. Very light weight and the quality is not bad. It’s very simple to use since there are only two buttons, and it can be integrated into quadcopter FPV system very easily with the version 2 of this camera. They provide options to power this camera with your ESC BEC or 3.7V Lipo, and you can stream real time video and feed it to your Video transmitter.
Check out this video to see the quality, I have not edited the video from the plane (only cuts). The quadcopter I used is the mini quad I built a few weeks back.
The 808 #16 Key Chain camera is one of the most well known FPV options out there at the moment because of it’s light weight and cheap cost. Some even compare it with the gopro. Of course this camera is no where near the quality of the gopro, but when budget or lifting capacity become scarce it’s a good choice!
You can buy it from Hobbyking, or ebay.
Once I received the camera, I immediately take and case off and did some modifications, such as taken the built-in battery out and replaced it with a mini-jst adapter, made a video out adapter cable to fit into my light weight FPV system etc.
However when I was replacing the battery I think I might have accidentally fried the battery module. Now even with a fully charged battery, the camera would shut itself off when turned on. Anyway it’s working fine with power from the 5V ESC BEC. I will mainly use it with quadcopters anyway so I am not hugely concerned.
At the moment, I am still keeping the 3.7V Lipo to power the video transmitter as I found that the BEC power supply is too noise when the motors are turning and I have rubbish pictures on the screen. The transmitter is very noise sensitive, so would be better off having an isolated power source for it.
If you have any problems with this camera, do check out these troubleshooting posts.
General and Basic Troubleshoot
2 comments
Hi Oscar,
I’m very interested in using the 808#16 as a replacement for the video camera recording facility on my JJRC H8D quadcopter. The problem is that the H8D uses the same video to provide both FPV and video recording – but when the video is recording, there are quite severe FPV frame dropouts. I could just turn the 808#16 on before a flight and off at the end – but is there any way I can rewire the transmitter video record signal from the H8D video record operation to the 808#16 record on/off button. Having had the 808 apart – it doesn’t look easy – every thing is surface mounted and thus difficult to re-solder – but you may know different.
Hi,
I was wondering which 808 cam this is that you had to connect your own video out?
If it is the 808#3 or 808#9 could you show where this connection must be made?