I just use the suction cup and plug in power port as I take it in other trucks

 

I am looking into the Mobius. The small size, good mount, and sharp recording are plusses.

The downside is that it has no built-in monitor, so it takes some additional steps to get it focused and aimed properly.

Anyone with any hands-on experience with this one? Since it is available in a standard and a wide-angle lens, which would you get?

Pop

 

thanks.

don't want to go that route. just want to get it installed and forget about it. shouldn't be too bad of an install. will update you guys when everything comes in.

 

I would like a small unit that hides behind my mirror. Cmon irs 2014. How hard is that. I don't require a screen. I'll have to do some shopping. Don't need anything fancy like GPS either.

 

An idea to take things step further:

With the cheap cost of hard drives and small compact basic mini pc format it might be worth putting a small PC box that you could remote into with any of the andriod apple or windows phones or of course with a keyboard and small flat screen which could be a GPS if its has a aux video in feed. That would then allow you to have a ton of HD space to keep all your video on and could over write it given that much space and be in no danger of over writing something recent. Single Hd at 4 TB would cover you for a long time. Not to mention it could then be used for all sorts of things like running Auto Enginuity your GPS with a monitor which could be touch screen as well. Nice to be able to bring up certain engine data with date stamp to track issues and their start etc. That is only scratching the surface.

Then again I have a bad habit of going down these rabbit holes and taking things a bit farther than maybe some may wish to go. It just with the tech today you can really do some very nice and helpful things for a few hundred dollars.


I know after driving in large OTRs and lifted PUs etc having a front camera wide angle is almost mandatory if you do even moderate city/in-town driving where you have people in cross walks. You literally can not see a person step off the curb and right by your passenger side front end with people walking right up next to the bumper. Light turns green and ............... something you will haunt you forever.

Anyways just a thought.

 

I have liked the idea of a mini PC for carious controls. For the average Joe a dash cam should suffice. 4GB cards are not at all hard to come by. Heck, throw a 64gb in and you're good for a long while. But I have a 4 camera system (should have patented it years ago when I installed it... Anyone seen the new F150?) And it would be beneficial to record all 4 feeds simultaneously.

 

Already went nuts on the house.

Don't think the truck warrants the same, but you never know... Lol

 

Lol my cameras are for off road. They clean up my blind spots. While already small, off road blind spots kill especially in big vehicles. I have one on each mirror pointed at the front tires to avoid cliffs, a nose camera for steep inclines where I can't see the ground in front of me, only sky, and a back up camera

 

i feel like i shouldn't post here… onboard videos cams aren't for me. i'm just not there yet...

 

I have mine any time I go into a bank at night to use atm machine or any time I am in a store. I tend to point it near the door as that is where strange things happen. I use the dash cam as security system when not driving

 

There are many police and some fire and ems agencies issuing personal wearable cameras to their personal for the same reason.

 

I can't point at a single unit and say "That one" without owning one myself. I can read piles of specs and tell you which one is the flavor of the month, but I could miss something. I can share the list of things that are "gotchas" to watch out for, and features to consider for wants and needs. Objective reviews (pros and cons shared) from people who have used the product are your best friend in the Wild West that is the dashcam market. Those links I shared have plenty of examples of that very thing.

The Mobius was once the most recommended dashcam on the market. Since that time, many good products have come onto the market. The Mobius is not unlike the HERO action cameras, it's just a less expensive (and lower quality) version. If you go with the narrow-field lens, you can miss important things... like a vehicle entering an intersection in front of the truck. The drawback to the wide-angled lens is that it's just like the bottom lens on your tow mirror - distant objects are not easily seen. Hi-resolution cameras combat this problem - a little.

The problem with combination cameras (color and IR) is that the internal DVR records one or the other at a time - not both simultaneously. The cameras frequently switch between color and IR as the ambient light changes. The real problem kicks in when the camera is facing a set of headlights - this can make the camera switch back and forth between color and IR, and the electronics are playing a game of "catch-up" to get the image to remain clear with detail. This is akin to taking the time for your eyes to adjust when you walk from the house into the bright sunshine, then back again.

I work with "Car PCs" on a daily basis, they have SSDs - Solid State (hard) Drives. SSDs are slowly replacing the "legacy" spinning-disk hard drives in computers. We have a number of rack-mount i7 computers at work that have SSDs, with no HDDs that you likely have in the computer giving you access to the forum right now. The benefits are crazy-fast boot-ups and read times, very low power demand, no need for "defragging", and no moving parts - allegedly making them more reliable (we'll see). This no moving parts thing is where SSDs shine for an 8000-pound brick... like getting rid of the skipping that can happen on a CD player. SSDs were once crazy-expensive, but the prices are plummeting - as happens when new computer technology is mass-produced and mass-consumed.

Don't expect car PCs to be as reliable as their desktop counterparts - they live in very different environments. Vibration, dust, and extreme temps are very unfriendly to electronic circuitry. While you might make the counterpoint that the dash stereo has been working great for a lot of years, I could counter "What about the overhead?". The old car stereos are very basic and robust - car PCs are advanced technology by comparison... and a car stereo never needed a fan on the "processor" to keep it from overheating when in use. The car PCs I work with don't have fans - they are one great big heat-sink... and they need to be mounted where it's coolest in the vehicle and gets the most ventilation. The cooling fins need to be cleaned on a regular basis... so access is a factor.

 

The PCM's seem to live life ok in these trucks. Not sure if they have as hard life as a car stereo or overhead computer...

 

Yes, they do. They are also proprietary (and relatively simple) modules purpose-made. Many components in the car PC were engineered and built for a purpose other than riding in a NASA shock bed in an oven. While many people tout technology as making wondrous advancements in the last two decades, technology also threw robustness under the "Get money fast" bus. I am constantly repairing computers that are blowing components that never failed on the older versions of PCs. We're ripping through RAM, cooling fan mounts, graphics cards, LAN cards, FireWire splitters, hard drives, and power supplies on six-year-old computers, replacing 8-year-old computers - while the old Windows 98 computers are still chugging along with the original hardware.

What's going on? The "more-with-less" mentality has ruled for the last decade - 90nm integrated circuits went into production about that time - then 65nm ICs, and now they're talking 35nm ICs. As these chips pack more power on less real estate, we also get introduced to nasty phenomena like heat and "whiskers"... where conductive structures actually grow between the conductors for the processors. The electronics before this era were like dinosaurs (compared to modern capabilities) to be sure, but they also just kept working.

If the software/firmware was a failure, the lines of code were far fewer and simpler to manage. Now... the complexity is so vast that it takes a fleet of software engineers two years to find out why something is unstable (Windows Vista).

 

car pc is a thing of the past. cell phones and tablets can do almost everything.