Handheld USB Snake Scope
By Gordon DeWitte
Get all those weird endoscopic thoughts out of your head*. This USB Snake Scope “is a handy pipeline inspection and surveillance tool to help examine places that are hard to reach.” Powered by your computer’s USB port, the water-resistant camera head has two adjustable white LEDs for illumination and a 54° viewing angle f/2.8 lens with a 6 cm to infinity focal distance. Its 1/6″ CMOS VSA sensor (640×480 pixels) can take up to 30 fps videos, and also has a snapshot function. This flexible borescope’s cost ranges from $49 (but from a UK supplier, so shipping could be a tad expensive) to $74, and you also get a clip-on magnet for retrieving ferrous metal objects.
*Although I must admit I paused when I got to the “Insert into Post” command for adding its picture to the TM blog.
USB Snakescope Camera [Firebox]
Handheld USB Snake Scope [USB Fever]
USB Snake Scope Camera [Manufacturer's Site]
October 26th, 2009 at 8:26 am
This sounds great, but the complete lack of any sample pictures on any of the linked website makes me thing the quality is rather awful.
October 26th, 2009 at 7:49 pm
An endoscope with a 6cm focal length?
I can’t imagine that’ll cause any problems.