Covid Reminds Us That Necessity is the Mother of Invention

Following last year's Covid lockdown, much of industry was considered "essential" work and continued operations. This meant there were continued overhead crane breakdowns and frantic clients calling for immediate assistance to diagnose and prescribe a fix for their ailing bridge cranes. Unfortunately, the airlines were shut down, and I was marooned in Tucson. To be honest, even after the planes were again flying, I was reluctant to go through an airport and get on a plane.

 After three separate calls, of what sounded like really interesting projects, I proposed a radically different stopgap solution to the normal in person overhead crane inspection. I told the clients that even though I couldn't fly, I would send them a video recording kit that included multiple GoPro video cameras, modified magnetically mounted tripods and all the other bits and pieces they would need to record their crane problems. After the initial recording, we could review the videos on-line and determine if more videos were required.

With the GoPros, they could mount cameras on both end-trucks, and through the time stamping, we could watch the movement of both end-trucks side by side on the video screen. Further, we could witness crane skewing, electrical arcing, bearings, line shafts, side pulls, equalizer sheaves, etc. We could mount the cameras into places where I could never personally witness, and even if I could, the plant safety people would never allow me to ride the crane and view in real-time.

The cameras' beauty is that not only could it get me a bird's eye view that I could never otherwise view, but it also included sound for additional hints of grinding or squealing of bearings or wheel flange to rails issues. The videos would also serve as proof of problems that I could normally only verbally explain to the client. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video represents a whole damn book!

 Unfortunately, it was not just a case of buying a couple of cameras. First, I next did my homework and settled on the GoPro. After extensively playing with them at home, I found five roadblocks to what I hoped would be a clean and simple system.

1. Battery Life

2. Secure Camera Mounting

3. Camera Settings for Industrial Environments

4. Remote Control

5. Packaging for Shipment

1) Battery Life
Although GoPro advertises an hour battery life, it's closer to a half-hour with high or low ambient temperatures. Further, if you configure the camera for any of its special features like image stabilization, the battery life is even shorter. I, therefore, designed an external battery hookup and mounted it with a 27,000 mAh capacity external battery. Combining the external battery with a 512 GB SD card should provide a full 8-hour shift of recording if required.

2) Secure Camera Mount

Camera mounting consists of two separate issues. First, what type of mount can I twist around to set the camera as such an angle that will get the picture I'm looking for. Second, what kind of mount will hold the camera securely enough to keep my expensive plastic toys from crashing to the ground?

After buying a dozen "off the shelf" mounts, I settled on a flexible tripod and then modified it with heavy-duty magnets. This led to a study of magnets. My first thought was that the stronger, the better, that is, until I found that I broke the tripod trying to get the magnet to release from the steel. Next was a study on how to mount steel magnets to plastic. After about of month of playing "Mr. Wizard," I had a working prototype.

3) Camera Settings for Industrial Environments

As anybody with a modern digital camera knows, it's no longer just "point and shoot," especially when taking videos in a dirty industrial environment. 

There are literally hundreds of settings to optimize the videos. Sure, there are automatic settings, but they are optimized for motion on sunny days with a person-sized object about 6 to 10 feet away from the camera. Optimizing for taking videos while mounted on a vibrating surface, with poor lighting while trying to set up such that you maximize battery life, requires going deep into the manual settings. 

4) Remote Control

One problem I almost forgot about was how to actuate the cameras from the floor level. Surprisingly the GoPro remote control was not all that great, but equally, surprising the iPhone and Android apps worked like a dream.

5) Packaging for Shipment

The last hurdle was finding a protective case that could be used both for UPS shipping and airport check-in. I then got a Pelican roller case and proceeded to make a custom video kit.

THE RESULTS:

After talking over the option of video instead of delaying the project until the Covid crisis was over, and life was getting back to normal, he opted to give it a try. I was concerned about sending so much tech stuff to someone with no experience with digital cameras, but he was game to give it a try. 

 The bottom line is that the proof is in the results. The client sent back about an hour of video and a couple of dozen pictures. I analyzed them and put them together in the following 3-minute video and accompanied the video with a 16-page report.