Perfect for hard-to-reach places that need inspecting.
As someone with a lot of tech gear, I pride myself on the level of care I take with my cable management. I’ve used just about every trick in the book to tie up and tuck back cables to make everything look neat and clean around a workspace. The biggest challenge I’ve had thus far has been cable management beneath an open smart desk. Because there are fewer places to hide power bricks and cable bundles, you have to enlist additional help. My favorite assistant in this venture is the 2×2 inch Open Slot Wire Raceway from StarTech.com. Two years ago I used that remarkable accessory to run cables, but it’s been a never-ending battle with the addition of other devices to the workspace. So today, I run into the issue of tracking down cables to their place of origin and trying to snake them through the raceway without damaging them. While I can tear down the raceway and start from scratch, I would much rather use the DS430 Professional Industrial Endoscope from Depstech to assess the situation and make a viable plan.
DETAILS
The DS430 Professional Industrial Endoscope is a dual-lens endoscope that can inspect the range of 178º to its front and side. The front camera has a focal range of 3-10cm and the side camera is 2–6cm. There is one button that switches between the front camera and the side camera so that you can shoot at different angles as much as you need. The camera is located in the end of a 16.5-foot long gooseneck snake cable. This cable can be folded into different shapes and reach deep into areas that need inspection. The cable connects to a control monitor that features a 4.3-inch IPS screen. This allows the user to view an image in real-time as it’s being captured by the camera. The monitor has a 3000 mAh battery powering it for 4-5 hours of continuous work. The endoscope also has seven adjustable LED lights and four external fill lights on the side with three different lighting modes to assist during inspections with the camera.
USER EXPERIENCE
One of the first things I want to note is how handy the hard case is to keep this device in. The case has precut foam on the inside to store the cable and monitor. The endoscope actually has quite a kit that comes with it. The kit includes the IPS digital endoscope, a hard shell carrying case, a 32GB Micro SD card, a Micro USB charging cable, an accessory kit, and a quick start guide. Before I started working with the endoscope, I was a little intimidated because I had never worked with something like this before. I am amazed at the quality of the images that the camera captures. With a 1080p camera built-in, the video that’s being captured is standard HD format. While my primary reason for wanting this kit was to be able to organize cables better, it’s also very helpful for snaking cables through a wall. We have a TV that is wall-mounted and for years my fiance has wanted to push the wires through the wall. This has made me nervous because we don’t exactly know what is in the wall wiring-wise. The endoscope helped us map out what was in the wall so I could comfortably drop the cables where we needed them.
To start with the endoscope, you connect the flexible cable to the monitor using the aluminum alloy connector port. You will want to make sure the monitor/controller is fully charged before you begin. At one point, I tried to use the camera, but it ended up having a dead battery. I tried to connect a portable battery so I could go ahead with my testing, but I couldn’t record any images at that point. I could still see what the camera was looking at, but I couldn’t record anything. After the battery was charged though, I didn’t have any trouble.
To test out the Endoscope, I snaked the cable through the wire raceway so I could get an idea of where cables were clumped together and where there might be problems. Because there were so many cables run through this raceway, there wasn’t much room for the endoscope. That said, I was able to run it through part way. You’ll see from the video I captured that I get to a certain point where I can’t push the endoscope through any farther. Overall, I was really impressed with the quality of the video. There were only a couple of times where the camera went out of focus or the lights weren’t strong enough to show everything that was going on. This video clip is completely unedited other than flipping the clip horizontally so that it wasn’t upside down. The clips are recorded as AVI files. I dropped them onto a timeline in DaVinci Resolve just to marry the two clips into one for this preview.
CONCLUSION
I think the DS430 Professional Industrial Endoscope is a really great option for any type of industrial work, but it can also be used on a personal level if you do a lot of home improvements. It’s a very handy device and very easy to use. I was impressed with the simplicity of the controls and how easy it was to operate.
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