Godfrey
somewhat colored
Somewhere around 2015 or so, I bought a Rylo 360° video camera with the notion of using it to capture videos of my bicycle rides around Santa Clara Valley. I used it pretty often until about 2018 and then it got stuffed into a bag and buried in my over-full equipment closet as the pandemic closed in.
I was hunting in the closet last evening for a better shooting bag for the Hasselblad SWC (it's a bit wider than fits nicely in my usual general purpose shooting bag) and happened upon the Rylo kit in its bag. The bag is "almost" the right one for the SWC, but I need to create a different padding insert for it to use it with the SWC so that it fits and is protective. Be that as it may, I laid out the Rylo and all its accessories and wondered if the batteries would take a charge ... I have three and they were stone dead.
I set two of them into the Rylo charger and plugged them and the camera into a 2.4A USB power supply overnight. The charger and the camera all responded by showing lights and activity after about 10 minutes of time on the power supply so I had hope. By morning, the camera reported 120 minutes of recording time with all three batteries ... Happy happy! So the next thing to test: would this decade old device still work, and would its iPhone/iPad app still work, all these OS revisions later?
I powered up the camera and did a one minute walk around my condo with it in 360 record mode. My current iPhone/iPad are both USB-C interface, the Rylo cable is a USB mini to Lightning plug. I used an Apple Lightning to USB-C adapter, crossed my fingers, and plugged it into the iPhone 15 Pro. The Rylo app launched on the current version of iOS, and a moment later the Rylo camera initialized itself and presented all the videos stored on its mini-SD card, including the new one I'd just made. Everything worked! So I switched it to my iPad Pro 11" and it also worked there. I'm truly amazed.
The batteries have held a full charge all day (I just tested the camera and batteries again) so, wow, more than a decade old, half of that spent forgotten in a bag, the OS they're running on updated at least five times, and the whole system is still perfectly functional. Rylo is long gone from the market, but heck, as long as it's working I'll start using it again. 😀
G
I was hunting in the closet last evening for a better shooting bag for the Hasselblad SWC (it's a bit wider than fits nicely in my usual general purpose shooting bag) and happened upon the Rylo kit in its bag. The bag is "almost" the right one for the SWC, but I need to create a different padding insert for it to use it with the SWC so that it fits and is protective. Be that as it may, I laid out the Rylo and all its accessories and wondered if the batteries would take a charge ... I have three and they were stone dead.
I set two of them into the Rylo charger and plugged them and the camera into a 2.4A USB power supply overnight. The charger and the camera all responded by showing lights and activity after about 10 minutes of time on the power supply so I had hope. By morning, the camera reported 120 minutes of recording time with all three batteries ... Happy happy! So the next thing to test: would this decade old device still work, and would its iPhone/iPad app still work, all these OS revisions later?
I powered up the camera and did a one minute walk around my condo with it in 360 record mode. My current iPhone/iPad are both USB-C interface, the Rylo cable is a USB mini to Lightning plug. I used an Apple Lightning to USB-C adapter, crossed my fingers, and plugged it into the iPhone 15 Pro. The Rylo app launched on the current version of iOS, and a moment later the Rylo camera initialized itself and presented all the videos stored on its mini-SD card, including the new one I'd just made. Everything worked! So I switched it to my iPad Pro 11" and it also worked there. I'm truly amazed.
The batteries have held a full charge all day (I just tested the camera and batteries again) so, wow, more than a decade old, half of that spent forgotten in a bag, the OS they're running on updated at least five times, and the whole system is still perfectly functional. Rylo is long gone from the market, but heck, as long as it's working I'll start using it again. 😀
G
