The good news is my duct taping and super gluing worked. The camera didn’t move an iota—though sadly I had to tilt it a bit to the left to get it seated properly—and the servo controller stayed where it was supposed to.

Before I get into the downsides maybe I’ll just show the video.

So the first downside is that the video ends about five minutes earlier than it should have. When I rolled the car it rolled onto the shutter button, unbeknownst to me. It’s too bad since the crazier/more abusive stuff came after that.

The second downside is that both the camera and car took more abuse than they have before. The metal casing on the camera got scraped off on one corner. One of the front shocks on the car came apart, which is especially bad considering it’s an oil-filled shock absorber. I haven’t decided what I’ll do about that.

The third downside is that since I had to run the car without a body in order to get the camera on, it got more water damage than usual. Currently it only goes in reverse. I’ll take another look at it after it dries out.

I think I’m going to put this short-lived remote controlled car videography project aside until I figure out a way to get things to survive better.

1. Do it on pavement instead of snow.
2. Attach the camera more securely.

Since it’s been crazy nice lately—4º for the past couple days—we’ve had a lot of dry pavement coming out, so I took the camera/car combination out again today. I attached the camera directly to the chassis with the help of a styrofoam shim, rather than to the body like I did last time.

It started off promising! Up until the last ten seconds I think it counts as a modest success! There’s not so much bouncing and you can actually see what’s going on.

Sadly, those last ten seconds…yeah, I turned left when I should have turned right. It not only knocked the camera off, but it knocked the controller off the chassis. The design of the car is rather stupid in this regard: the controller is just cantilevered, held in by adhesive, in my case super glue. I’ll re–super glue it and see if I can’t try again tomorrow.

My ultimate plan was to take it off some sweet jumps. Now I’m wondering if the camera will survive the trip: it was just held in place by the aforementioned styrofoam shim and some duct tape. I’ll try it with more duct tape and see if I can’t get it to survive a jump tomorrow.

Right, so sadly that never happened as a kid, largely due to the fact that the smallest video camera in my day weighed as much as a small child and used a full-sized VHS (or BetaMax!) tape to record. But thanks to advancements in camera technology, Jasna getting me an awesome car for Christmas, and some help from a roll of duct tape, I finally managed to put this dream into action.

Across the street from us is an elementary school. Cruelly five days a week there are kids there (the nerve!), which means I can’t play there, but on the weekends it’s free. It’s an open sea of hard packed snow—almost ice, but not quite—which makes drifting a lot of fun, and it has a nice area of some fenced off trees that make a wonderful obstacle course. I took the camera there today to show up my mad skills.

Well so I’m posting this video mostly to show the absurd hilarity of it. Turns out if there were a tiny little driver in a remote controlled car, he would be subjected to shaking and whiplash so severe he’d probably pass on within a minute. Highlights of the videos include hitting a tree, hitting a post so hard at the very end that the camera came off, and minutes upon minutes of the horizon jumping up and down. If I ever try this again, it’s either going to have to be on smooth pavement or I’m going to have to have to find a way to stabilize the camera better. I should point out that, even by R/C car standards, the shocks on this car are really soft.

P.S. Yes, there will be a video of chasing the cats around, at some point (duh). We have to clean up the apartment better before making any such videos public, though, you understand.