I’ve recently had insulation installed under my house and, as winter approaches, I wanted to check to make sure no rats or pests were getting under there and wrecking it. I looked into building a little tracked robot with an IR camera, but the costs for this singular project were just too high. Instead I simply bought a very cheap plastic RC AirSoft tank and attached a very cheap wireless night vision camera, similar to this one I found on Amazon. To power the camera, I used a small SLA battery like this one.
This was actually a great solution because the $45 tank had several degrees of motion including all the normal tread directions (forward/back/left/right) as well as an independent turret that can rotate a total of 290 degrees. The gun barrel can also move up and down, and the cherry on top is that this is an AirSoft tank so you can actually fire those annoying yellow pellets out of the gun barrel!
So for under $100 I was able to put together an effective scout robot that also has some firepower. I’m looking forward to tearing it apart and putting in sensors and better motor controls and tying it in to a PC for operation over the ‘net.
Love it!! A little sad it is now stuck under the house… we will have to get a toy tank rescue team ready for Operation: Lost Tank.