Dr. Meter B003+ 300X USB digital endoscope/miscroscope camera

TLDR: an awesome cheap device wrapped in Chinese funkiness.

The details

It is hard, very hard to not pay attention to all the funny details that go around the device. But it’s a solid device that performs great for a good price. As far as I can tell, it does not do zooming per se, it is only able to get very close to a subject and thus when the resulting picture is displayed on a bigger screen, small details are visible. As such, what you see is strictly dependent on how close you stick the camera to your subject. In fact the camera has a focus length of a few millimeters to infinity, which means you ca use it a a regular camera but you’ll have to turn the focus knob quite a bit for that.

First, some pics of what it’s capable of

They are seriously lacking online

The device itself

 On its little tripod

The lens

Everything else

The device has multiple attachments referred to as “beauty inspection tools” which are meant to stick the camera in various orifices of one’s body. They are nicely sealed in sterilized bags (but not the anal one).

Some of the various “beauty inspection tools”…

The unboxing feels like opening a Chinese treasure chest, the mechanism, the texture, the looks; this product is made in China and not pretending otherwise. What else feels Chinese is pretty much anything written in English. It’s super funny to read it all.

Technically

The device is recognized as a standard camera in Windows, MacOS & Linux! No extra drivers necessary. This is what I love about buying products from smaller companies, they go after existing standards. As such you can open it with any webcam software, I took my test shots with photobooth. They provide some software for filming & measuring among other things but I care not about this functionality so I won’t spend the time loading it.

I’ll take it to the beehive this week-end and we’ll see how it does there.

Chicken cam – back online!

But with a serious loss of functionality. Given the internet connection that I have (cellular) I can’t reasonably set it up to do live streaming. I’ve also disabled interaction with the cam. What’s left is an image uploaded every hour. Not super duper cool but I’ll take what I can get in this neck of the woods.

Hopefully this will get better when better internet is available.

ZFS send/receive accross different transport mechanisms

Sending ZFS snapshots across the wires can be done via multiple mechanisms. Here are examples of how you can go about it and what the strengths and weaknesses are for each approach.

SSH

strengths: encryption / 1 command on the sender

weaknesses: slowest

command:

zfs send tank/volume@snapshot | ssh user@receiver.domain.com zfs receive tank/new_volume

NetCat

strengths: pretty fast

weaknesses: no encryption / 2 commands on each side that need to happen in sync

command:

on the receiver

netcat -w 30 -l -p 1337 | zfs receive tank/new_volume

on the sender

zfs send tank/volume@snapshot | nc receiver.domain.com 1337

(make sure that port 1337 is open)

MBuffer

strengths: fastest

weaknesses: no encryption / 2 commands on each side that need to happen in sync

command:

on the receiver

mbuffer -s 128k -m 1G-I 1337 | zfs receive tank/new_volume

on the sender

zfs send tank/volume@snapshot | mbuffer -s 128k -m 1G -O receiver.domain.com:1337

(make sure that port 1337 is open)

SSH + Mbuffer

strengths: 1 command / encryption

weaknesses: seems CPU bound by SSH encryption, may be a viable option in the future?

command:

zfs send tank/volume@snapshot | mbuffer -q -v 0 -s 128k -m 1G | ssh root@receiver.domain.com 'mbuffer -s 128k -m 1G | zfs receive tank/new_volume'

Finally, here is a pretty graph of the relative time each approach takes:

SSH + MBuffer would seem like the best of both worlds (speed & encryption), unfortunately it seems as though CPU becomes a bottleneck when doing SSH encryption.