Snake camera? Or what is the name of those things?

[OneMoreFarang]

I am looking for a camera with flexible arm to connect to my Android smartphone.

Something like a endoscope camera but with a view of a couple of meters.

It seems endoscope cameras focus a few centimeter. What I am looking for is a small camera which I can put through a hole in a dropped ceiling or other places to be able to inspect that area. I.e. where are cables in the ceiling, etc.

There are many cameras like this out there. But it seem they all only focus to objects which are a few cm in front of the lens. I want something with adjustable focus up to a few meter. And best case it should include a light source.

Do they exist? What are they called? Any links? Thanks!

 

 

[cliveshep]

Here - knock yourself out. Borescope or endoscope is what you are looking for. Choose from this extensive list:

 

https://www.alibaba.com/showroom/adjustable-focus-endoscope.html

[Farmerslife]

I had a quick look but couldn't find any borescopes with a focal length greater than 10cm. 

Presumably you have a reason for not wanting to use a standard cable and pipe detector?

A heavy duty option might be a drain or sewer camera but I don't know if you would be able to hire one here.

[OneMoreFarang]

1 hour ago, cliveshep said:

Here - knock yourself out. Borescope or endoscope is what you are looking for. Choose from this extensive list:

 

https://www.alibaba.com/showroom/adjustable-focus-endoscope.html

Thanks for the link. But the problem with those is the same problem which I described above. Here is the comment from one of those cameras: "This camera is near focus distance camera the focus distance is 3cm to 8cm. if the focus distance over 8cm it can't get the clear picture."

It seem they all have a similar short focal length. I guess with a longer focal lens they have a different name...

 

[OneMoreFarang]

2 minutes ago, Farmerslife said:

I had a quick look but couldn't find any borescopes with a focal length greater than 10cm. 

Presumably you have a reason for not wanting to use a standard cable and pipe detector?

A heavy duty option might be a drain or sewer camera but I don't know if you would be able to hire one here.

I want to look into the cavity of a closed dropped ceiling. My idea is to drill just a small hole or maybe use an existing (small) hole and then get an overview about where cables are. Maybe there are also drains, etc.

As far as I know cable detectors only detect cables if they are very near. I.e. they wouldn't detect a cable which is mounted on a concrete ceiling if I have the cable detector 20cm below that ceiling on the dropped ceiling.

 

This is a sample picture. In this case it is obviously easy to look because the panels can be removed. In some ceilings the panels can not be removed. That is what I have in mind.

 

[cliveshep]

We had the same problem with getting a look into our ground floor shower room ceiling void as the dogs were going bonkers and my wife insisted she heard slithering noises. 

 

So we took down the light and cut a small hole above it suffisient to push up a phone with a light on and take pics. Worked fine, and there in the corner nicely coiled up a golden tree snake. We decided to evict him'her and used an aerosol can of Chaindrite up the ceiling void both in that location and in other locations which also drove out a family of tokai geckos presumably with streaming eyes like us!

 

We do have a couple of hatches useful for putting up baited traps to catch rats, we removed 12 over the last rainy season, sadly parts of the overhang feature roofs at 1st floor level are inaccessible to us now but not to wildlife and they give access to the ground floor ceiling voids so it's traps and chaindrite to the rescue. Chaindrite doesn't kill them but it makes the space untenable to them.